There's precious little that bloggers like to do more than measure their own statistics, and gauge how they're doing, relative to the rest of the blogging community. And there's similarly precious little that smart Web developers like to do than harness publicly available data, point it at an intelligent database, and debut a new service.When the two come together as one, you have the potential for a must-bookmark site that stataholics and egotists alike will visit time and again.
While earlier this month, we talked about two new sites focused on tabulating popular shared links from Google Reader, in ReadBurner and Shared Reader, today we've seen a new, unheralded site emerge, which displays the most popular blogs, by RSS feed subscribers, and shows their day to day momentum in terms of new subscribers or defectors. That site's name, appropriately enough, is Rating Burner.
(Note: There are no blog hits for Rating Burner as of 8 p.m., but the secret is now out!)
Though in its early stages, Rating Burner is accomplishing what many geeks set out to do by hand just a few short months ago. (See: Top Blogs On Google Reader, How Many Google Reader Subscribers Do You Have? and Find the Number of Google Subscribers for Any Feed)
The site, currently holding approximately 400 individual blogs and RSS feeds, at time of this posting, aims to summarize a blog's feed popularity, show its Google PageRank (a measurement often used to illustrate trust), its aggregate change in subscribers over the previous 24 hours, including percentage change, when they most recently posted, and what, if any, ad services they use.
The Most Popular Blogs, According to Rating Burner
While the list isn't yet 100 percent inclusive, Rating Burner unsurprisingly shows TechCrunch, the official Google Blog, Mashable and Guy Kawasaki among the top-subscribed feeds. Amazingly, Rating Burner shows more than 11,000 new adds to TechCrunch's 654k subscriber army in the last day alone, dwarfing the 709 Mashable picked up, and my measly 38, although I did manage to go up more than 8 percent between the two snapshots.
As with ReadBurner, Rating Burner should only get better with time, and with user submissions of new blogs. The site offers an entry form to post new blogs for inclusion, and looks like it will soon add categories, to further segment the data. So far, the site has SEO blogs and Gadget blogs listed as possible filters.
Also like ReadBurner, upon initial writeup, Rating Burner's UI is quite spartan, but the functionality is very interesting. I'm impressed to see the developer has grabbed the FeedBurner statistics for each blog and is hosting the results on their site, rather than externally pointing to FeedBurner graphics. I for one noted the statistics listed for louisgray.com were from Monday night, so it's likely the data trails by a full 24 hours. Thanks to my subscriber count dropping from 436 to 413 overnight, I would expect my own stats to drop tomorrow, reflecting Tuesday's data.
louisgray.com, 37th fastest-growing, according to Rating Burner
If you would like to be included in Rating Burner, post your blog feed at their URL, and they will likely index you for tomorrow's results. While I used the site's contact us form on their Web site to reach the developer, I haven't yet heard back, and we don't yet know for certain the individual behind the service. Domain name records show Rating Burner registered to Alex Fedorov in Massachusetts, so we hope to hear from him soon and see the service further develop.
guess mashable is just waiting to publish this :)
ReplyDeletenice article
There's a big caveat here. RSS feed stats are easy to game. Flock and other sites automatically add "RSS subscriptions" from some blogs if you, say, happen to download the Flock browser and never use it.
ReplyDeleteThis controversy blew up last year:
http://mashable.com/2007/10/15/google-reader-stats-are-bullshit-with-proof/
Eldon, I do recall the argument over Google Reader stats. In the article you reference, Pete Cashmore linked to my comments as well.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.louisgray.com/live/2007/10/in-absence-of-google-innovation-list.html
I wouldn't claim its 100% clean data. After all it's not revenue, and these aren't public companies bound by regulations. But it's a start.
interesting idea (even if I am at 203 :) ) it will be another new idea to keep an idea on and see how it develops.
ReplyDeleteHey Louis. Nice find. I have to assume that unless you have the embedded code for Feedburner readers on your blog, they can't extract it. (We don't)... Regardless, thanks to YOU, TechMeMe and Sphinn, ours went platinum this week :)
ReplyDeleteKeep up the cool stuff and Thanks!
Charlie
As I written before, there's a very similar service Mindity. It's a desktop app with the same ranking functions like here in Rating Burner. Plus, more social networking functions. They're just started up, but I like the idea *how* they did it.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mindity.com/WhatIs.aspx
Big issue. If you use MyBrand on FeedBurner, right now, you don't get listed. I dropped them a note to see if that will be corrected.
ReplyDeleteVery cool stuff. Nice to see move creative applications in the RSS space.
ReplyDeleteSupport for branded feeds is now added. Now feeds that points to subdomain of a blog but still published with feedburner can be added.
ReplyDeleteRating Burner now have a button that bloggers can put into their blogs homepage. Button will automatically shows blog ranking and when you click on it, you will be redirected exactly where this blog is sitting in rating.
ReplyDelete