Monthly Archives: December 2010

Keeping Count

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I don’t want to jinx it, but I’ve been keeping track of citations of my reporting in major media publications (defined as: indexed in Google News and something I am proud of being cited in) and 2010 is going out with a bang. All on ReadWriteWeb of course, not a whole lot going on here on Marshallk.com.

If you’ll indulge me just for a moment: I counted 6 in 2006, 2 in 2007, 12 in 2008, 15 in 2009 and just hit 50 in 2010, including 16 this month. Maybe my counting is just getting better, I don’t know. I am thankful every day for my job and for those of you who read and help me write the things I do. Look out, 2011, here we come.

ReadWriteWeb #3 Most Read News by Interactive Marketers, Forrester Poll Says

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That from a new poll of just under 100 marketing professionals, performed by the world’s leading marketing analyst firm, Forrester. (“New Media Dominates For Interactive Marketing News & Information“) It seems a little crazy, but the internet is very important to marketers, so publications that focus on it exclusively, with an eye towards the future, make sense for marketers to read.

Mashable serves marketers directly (though it’s been hours since I first wrote about Twitter’s opening the doors for marketers to request ad buys directly and no Mashable coverage yet!) – so it makes sense that they are at the top of this list. TechCrunch has made itself the center of the web universe, so it’s near if not at the top of almost every list.

ReadWriteWeb? Essential reading for interactive marketers? Cool! Thanks, folks!

Data: Making a List of the Top 300 Blogs about Data, Who Did We Miss?

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Dear friends and neighbors, as part of my ongoing practice of using robots and algorithms to make grandiose claims about topics I know too little about, I have enlisted a small army of said implements of journalistic danger to assemble the above collection of blogs about data. I used a variety of methods to build the first half of the list, then scraped all the suggestions from this Quora discussion to flesh out the second half. Want to see if your blog is on this list? Control-F and search for its name or URL and your browser will find it if it’s there.

Why data? Because we live in a time when the amount of data being produced is exploding and it presents incredible opportunities for software developers and data analysts. Opportunities to build new products and services, but also to discover patterns. Those patterns will represent further opportunities for innovation, or they’ll illuminate injustices, or they’ll simply delight us with a greater sense of self-awareness than we had before. (I was honored to have some of my thoughts on data as a platform cited in this recent Slate write-up on the topic, if you’re interested in a broader discussion.) Data is good, and these are the leading people I’ve found online who are blogging about it.

How the Blogs Are Ranked

I then ran these blogs through my favorite web service, Postrank, which looks at every post across every one of these blogs and scores them in terms of social media engagement: comments left, inbound links from other blogs, times that link was shared on Twitter, bookmarked on Delicious and more. Postrank then ranks all the blogs in any collection in terms of the amount of social media engagement they have received in recent history. That’s where this ranking came from. Nothing but which sites get included is under my control – so I think I can be objectively proud that my co-workers at ReadWriteCloud have come in at #3. Note that you might find a blog or two here where Postrank’s analysis of its feed needs a reset, because it’s hit an error and returned blank results. That’s what happened with the primary O’Reilly feed about data, and I’ve emailed Postrank to ask them to reset their scoring machine for it. That’s especially in need of remedy given that O’Reilly is working hard on a forthcoming conference all about data called Strata. (I’ll be there, moderating a panel on data-driven journalism.)

After I ran these through Postrank, I pulled down the data the way I wanted it using Needlebase, then put it in this Google Spreadsheet and embedded it here.

I did the same thing with 300 blogs about geotechnology last week – and just like I did then, I’ll ask now: who did we miss? I’d love to get these leader boards built out for several of the top topics ReadWriteWeb covers and turn them into weekly posts, covering the leading and ascendent voices in niche blogospheres covering topics that will change the future of the web and world.

I imagine that Data Blogs may be a bigger world than Geo Blogs, so I may have missed more this time. Let me know in comments if you’d like your blog included in the index and I’ll add it. Or if you know others that ought to be included. Fun times – and thanks for continuing to blog, folks, in this era of 140 character utterances!