But this is why we reported both numbers. TLB makes it easy to see what traffic scores are, and then offers a measure to compare with.

I myself am not clear whether incoming traffic, links, or technorati’s total link score, is more “reliable” as a measure of influence/popularity/or what have you. And I’d be pleased if this post motivated folks to come up with their own lists – indeed, that is why I asked Sam to make the list in an excel file which you can download and play with. Or simply make up your own. The point of this post was not to make any claims about quality, as I expressly said. Indeed, I thought one of the neat things that this analysis may have exposed is that the various law blogs are flourishing in entirely different communities of readers.

-DAH.

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/2005/01/blog_ranking_metrics/

Here is a more recent take:

http://serandez.blogspot.com/2007/07/ecosystem-thoughts_11.html

Note the part that says: “I guess what surprises me most is that the rankings go strictly by the number of incoming links. Traffic plays no role in the TTLB rankings. (Technorati uses some combination of the two.)”

I was really surprised by that, because as evidenced by my comment in our discussion at FLP I thought TTLB used both links and page loads, as Technorati does. So I checked the TTLB website and the TTLB FAQ (http://truthlaidbear.com/FAQ.php) says:

“The TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem is an application which scans weblogs and generates a list of weblogs ranked by the number of incoming links they receive from other weblogs on the list.”

There is a completely independent “Ecotraffic” counter that TTLB will use to republish Sitemeter data if you are not concerned about reader/commenter privacy issues. I am.

Ann,

TTLB “ranks” FLP, but it does not list the traffic numbers, which is what our list is based on. For the same reason, we excluded patently-o.

Technorati offers, in my view, a very bad metric, because it includes blogroll links. Not that TLB offers a “good” system, just a convenient one, and one used by Roger in the previous posting on this topic on opinio juris.

dave

or at least it did a few minutes when I used the search function here: http://truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.php

Given the significantly right wing tilt of the blogger behind TTLB, I prefer not to give him Feminist Law Professor’s page load stats by signing up with that site. FLP does have a Stat Counter (which is somewhat more protective of reader and commenter privacy than Sitemeter) and is FLP is also ranked by Technorati. You can find links to both at the bottom of the FLP blog.

http://truthlaidbear.com/showdetails.php?host=http://mirrorofjustice.com

-Dave

(a terrific blog on Catholic Legal Theory)

BlackProf was left out of the study, but it’s tracked by TLB: http://truthlaidbear.com/showdetails.php?host=http://blackprof.com.

If your blog isn’t included in the data, you can find out whether it’s tracked on TLB at this link: http://truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.php

Looks like Patently-O would fall right before Balkinization.

http://truthlaidbear.com/showdetails.php?host=http://patentlaw.typepad.com

Probably because there is no sitemeter stats link on Professor Crouch’s site.