E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Top500 Feedster – Just Another Ego Boost?

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

I am sure that by now everybody has been reading some place or another about the recent Top500 Feedster ratings for some of the most popular weblogs out there. And like usual it never ceases to amaze me how certain offerings and applications know exactly where to click to get some hot discussions going on out in the Blogosphere.

Top500 Feedster is just the latest example. You get to gather the Top 500 most popular weblogs from the Internet Blogosphere, you do not give out what criteria you have used to make that selection and right away you got your discussion and everybody talking about the same topic. Bingo ! You got the publicity you were asking for. And this seems to be the case for Feedster.com this time around. Funny thing of all this is that this is not the first, nor will it be the last time, we are going to see something popping up like that. It happened before with BlogLines, and its Top100 most popular weblogs, and I am sure that we will see it with some other services and not too long from now.

So what is the point of having such lists ? Do they actually work ? I must be honest and mention that in my case they do not seem to be as effective as you would expect. Take, for instance, the Top500 Feedster listing. Everybody who has been involved with weblogs one way or another would probably be able to recognise most of those weblogs already (They maybe even subscribe to most of them), so why do people still like watching them ? Is it for the ego boost of checking if your own weblog is listed over there or not, or also if, from a reader’s perspective, it would be an ego boost since those kind of lists actually show you that you are reading the right stuff.

Either way it looks like everybody loves going through those lists, regardless of who may be behind them or what the criteria has been used. A good question would be if the Blogosphere would be the same if they would not exist. And the answer I can think of is that it wouldn’t certainly be the same thing. Why ? Because of the hundreds, if not thousands, of connections that will come out from them. Just think about the huge amount of conversations that the latest Top500 Feedster offering has promoted. So whether we like it or not, whether we consider those lists an ego boost or not, they are here to stay and enrich our weblogging experience. So we might as well embrace them, right ?