The Blogosphere’s 29 Most Influential Political Bloggers

08 Apr, 2004 by John Hawkins

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In the past, I have ranked blogs based on their Alexa ranking. However, Alexa isn’t a perfect tool and it also is unable to evaluate certain types of websites, which makes it less than ideal way of establishing a blogger pecking order.

Therefore, I decided to try a different approach just to see how that compared — ranking political blogs based on how many links they’re receiving from their fellow bloggers. I went to Technorati, Daypop, Blogstreet, and the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem on Tuesday and counted how many links went to the top 100 POLITICAL blogs listed. Then I went through and weeded out any blog that didn’t make the top 100 on at least 3 of the 4 measuring tools.

At that point, there were only 29 blogs left and I took their best 3 scores (or there only 3 scores if that was the case) and added them up. For example, if “Blog X” was the 3rd, 12th, 19th, & 26th, most linked to blog on the 4 top 100 pages I used, the 26th place finish would be dropped and “Blog X” would get a score of 34. Blogs with a score <34 would be ahead of "Blog X" and blogs with a score >34 would be ranked behind it. Understand the scoring? Good deal.

In that case, here are the blogosphere’s 29 most influential political bloggers based on the number of links they receive from other blogs…

Bloggers	Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem	Technorati Top 100	Daypop Citations	Blogstreet Top 100	Total
1) Instapundit	1	5	3	2	6
2) Andrew Sullivan	5	11	10	5	20
3) Eschaton	4	16	8	9	21
4) Talking Points Memo	3	13		7	23
5) Daily Kos	2	18	12	19	32
6) USS Clueless	8		14	18	40
7) CalPundit	14	30		26	70
8) The Volokh Conspiracy	6	36		31	73
9) James Lileks	11	44	63	20	75
10) Little Green Footballs	7	25	51	73	83
11) Samizdata	31	67	26	33	90
12) VodkaPundit	33	74	29	32	94
13) Matthew Yglesias	17	86	44	42	103
14) Where is Raed?	68	23	16	24	108
15) Talk Left	38	90	30	44	112
16) Asymmetrical Information	42		33	38	113
17) A Small Victory	12	52		55	119
18) Scrappleface	27	82	32	64	123
19) OxBlog	36	98	50	40	126
20) Right Wing News	26	87	40	62	128
21) BuzzMachine	44		23	66	133
22) Brad DeLong	28	78		43	149
23) The Truth Laid Bear	41	70	53		164
24) Oliver Willis	55		35	83	168
25) Lawrence Lessig		100	27	60	187
26) Crooked Timber	25	88		81	194
27) Counterspin Central	56		72	81	209
28) Team Stryker	62		71	92	225
29) Rittenhouse Review	73		66	95	234