Note: a new edition of this list is available here!
This is a sad day...
My blog is no longer the most popular software-development related blog of continental Europe. That other Dutch blogger (at #18) has managed to overtake me (at #24) in my own list. The nerve! The horror! I suspect his rise to fame was accellerated when he interviewed me some months ago. Bugger. I will let this sink in for a while. (And if you want to interview me, go away!)
In the meantime... please enjoy the 4th edition of the Top 200 Blogs for Developers.
Yes, two hundred blogs this time! Not one hundred. Two hundred! I'm in a generous mood. And that's not the only change. The other important change is that I replaced one of the metrics in my calculations. I am no longer counting the number of comments on each blog in this list. It just wasn't scalable. It made my fingers go numb. And my eyes bleed. And I had to drink way too much coffee. It was an unhealthy metric, if you ask me. Fortunately, a better and easier solution presented itself: I am now including PostRank (from AideRSS) in my calculations. "PostRank is based on social engagement, which refers to how interesting or relevant people have found [a blog post] to be." (see here) The PostRank metric tells us how much people have been talking, tweeting, digging, and commenting on blog posts. It is exactly what I needed!
So, I calculated the sum of PostRank scores per blog (over a short time frame), which reflects both the quantity and quality of blog posts. (A blog with just one article scoring PostRank 10 earned as many points as a blog with 10 articles of PostRank 1.) In this new edition you can see that the inclusion of PostRank had a tremendous effect on the rankings. And a good thing too! The stale and smelly old blogs with only few fresh articles all tumbled down the list, while fresh blogs with lots of high quality content are all going up! It also resulted in a new number one!! Scott Hanselman has taken over from Joel Spolsky, which is understandable, as Scott produces many more popular articles these days than Joel does.
As I told you before, the other metrics I use are Google PageRank, Technorati Authority, Alexa Rank, Google links, and Twitter Grader Rank. (For more information see: How to Make a Top Blog List) Note that PostRank somewhat favors aggregated blogs with multiple authors, because they usually produce more posts per week. On the other hand, the Twitter Grader Rank favors individual authors, because individual Twitter accounts are usually more popular than collective accounts. So that should even things out...
(If you want the full list with all individual metrics, download the Excel file here.)
I hope you will enjoy the new edition of this list. It was, as usual, a tremendous amount of work. If you like the results, then please tweet, digg, bookmark, and comment the hell out of it! I need it. I must take back the lead from that other Dutch guy.
(Note: if you want me to include your blog on this list next time, send me a message via email or Twitter!)
(Update 1-7-2009: The list does not contain blogs where the authors exclusively write about specific tools or technologies, like .NET, Java. Every blog should have at least _some_ content that is of interest to every developer regardless of technical background. Scott Hanselman is a good example of that. He often writes about MS technologies, but also regularly about more generic topics.)
Legend
TT = This Time
LT = Last Time
Note: for some of the statistics I happily used the script that was kindly supplied by Steven Machtelinckx. This saved me a lot of time... Thanks Steven!
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