July Halfdone NZ Blog Stats
This months stats are over the break. Over 300 blogs are ranked this month, many added in the last few days. Having just conducted that excercise, I’ve drawn up these criteria.
To be ranked on Halfdone’s rankings, the following rules apply.
1. The blog has to be about something – a surprising number aren’t.
2. That something can’t be you, it might be what you think about a whole range of things, but no one is interested in what you put on your toast this morning. We’re also not interested in the toast your horse ate or where you threw out your uneaten toast or the music you listen to while you do these things. However, if you make that toast into a mural of some sort (say, Claton Weatherston in some sort of interesting position noose) and post that and other toast murals depecting current events on a regular basis then that’s different.
2a. Blogs intended for an “internal” audience are generally not included – “Toast Society Member News” is out.
3. If you write for a newspaper or TV, generally we’re not going to include you since people could just buy your newspaper or watch your TV station if they really wanted to know what you thought. It’s nice you have something that’s called a blog, and I’m sure it’s really popular but it’s just not what we’re looking for here. And you sort of have an unfair advantage. And you probably don’t fit criteria 5.
3a. If you’re getting paid by someone to do it, then that’s not really fun either. If you’re promoting your company’s products with a blog then that’s just plain boring and probably fails rule 1. MPs are sort of an exception to this, I think.
4. It’s got to be a New Zealand blog – this means written by a New Zealander or someone who lives here. However, if you’re a New Zealander who’s in Texas and only blogs about issues in Texas that’s not really that interesting to us here, is it? Unless you’re really good with toast murals.
5. Your blog has to resolve in Alexa and Technorati. If your blog is myblog.cooltoast.com and typing that into those sites gives data for cooltoast.com, we can’t really use that data because let’s face it, cooltoast.com is way more popular than the stuff you blog about. And yes, cooltoast.com is a real site. Blogs that don’t resole like this end up on the “Sites that cannot be calculated” list in no particular order.
6. If you’re in the top 20, the rules will be applied a bit tighter. Ultimately these things are a subjective call and we’re happy to have people make a case for a blog to be included (or removed). But not the toast you ate for breakfast – did I mention that?
7. Yes, you’re blog is really lowly ranked, and the ranking jumps around a lot. That’s because your blog sucks, and every two months somone looking for non-sucky stuff makes the massive blunder of clicking on a link to your blog and doubles it’s traffic for that month, putting it ahead of a hundred blogs who weren’t so lucky.
Other notes are below the rankings.
