The good blogs

Mark Evans writes that Technorati is now tracking 50 million blogs and that the number of blogs continues to double every 5-7 months. The cynic in me gets concerned about such numbers and using such trends for foecasting purposes – we’ve seen this kind of forecasting before: remember MCI’s similar forecasts for the growth of the internet – those often reproduced numbers drove Wall Street lemmings over the cliff.

Whatever the right number and whatever the rate of growth may be, there is a shift in the dynamic of reporting and distributing news and commentary. 50 million blogs.

Much has already been written about the challenge of filtering through the enormous numbers of content suppliers to find the material you want to read. There are a variety of sites that are now trying to index blogs, but each has its own shortcomings.

Canadian entrant ‘The Good Blogs‘ aims to offer a circle of moderated and unmoderated referrals. We’re trying it out (see the sidebar). How to rank and rate blogs is a real challenge. There is a difference between popular and good quality.

One of the promises of the emergence of user-created content is the broad diversity of viewpoints that can be economically distributed. How do we ensure that such voices from the edge are able to be found and heard? What is the right way to rank them?

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The Good Blogs, Mark Evans, ranking