David Brake's blog
Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist
6 June 2004
Academic weblog ranking schemes
Filed under:Academia,Best of blog.org,Weblogs at10:08 am

“Alex Halavais”:http://alex.halavais.net/ has tried to produce a ranking of

2 Comments

  1. A few comments:

    First, I didn’t set out to create a ranking, it was a bi-product of trying to figure out a way of determining whether academics are forming a blogging community. I have no mechanism (nor intent, at least for now), for making this a permanent “rankings board” or anything of the sort.

    One of the reasons I did think it was interesting to post is that some of the superstars, like Lessig, are *not* at the top. In other words, the universal “A-list” may not be the local A-list.

    I bet you are thinking of Cameron Marlow’s ICA paper, which separates out blogroll links from permalinks. I have been doing something similar, though it looks like he beat me out. The paper is at overstated.net.

    You are absolutely correct: we need to know more about how and why people make links. I have some work that will address this, which I hope to blog about shortly.

    How could Alex think for a moment that…

    Well that’s simple enough to answer: academic quality is built on the idea of peer review. At present, the lists of scholars that are generated are decided upon by a single “editor.” Note also that citation analysis, which is in many ways a direct parallel to link analysis, is regularly used to determine the quality of academic publications. While peer review has its own problems, I had hoped that it would be a good way of *collectively* deciding which blogs were of scholarly (no definition for this, mind you) value. Turns out that this idea was wrong–as I noted in the post, there are plenty of blogs that have no links to them that are, in my opinion, very worthwhile. But it didn’t hurt to check, did it?

    Comment by Alex — 6 June 2004 @ 4:59 pm

  2. Oh, and as for #4, you weren’t on the SWB list–at least not at this URL–which left you off the rankings entirely. I’ve fixed that now.

    Comment by Alex — 6 June 2004 @ 5:11 pm

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