[ranking blogs] 10 new criteria for assessing a great weblog

As many know, I run a Blogfocus on Tuesdays and Saturdays so, like you, I get to read many blogs and of course have come to some conclusions about them.

To that end, I’ve strung together 10 criteria of a great weblog which looks at Iain Dales’s ten to start with but then diverges. If you apply these criteria to the blogosphere, then a slightly different top 100 emerges. To start with, the 4 types of blogs I have in mind are:

1] Single purpose blogs, such as in economics, where the writer is well known and has worked hard to get where he’s got – publishing books, using RSS feeds using the latest schemes and technology and establishing his authority, stamping his mark as it were. Becoming a sort of Bloomsberg where people go for information and analysis and the more prosaic the writing and cutting the comment, the better.

2] MSM writers whose blog is an outlet in the blogosphere because one must be where the people are and certain things characterize them. In short, they can write, especially one or two from the Times. Others, like Neil Clark, can’t. Whatever one says about the MSM, these people have improved their writing over the years, forever at the mercy of sub-editors until they’ve honed their style and trimmed all wobbliness away.

3] Pollies who recognize the political need to blog and do so with varying results, e.g. Polly. Such as these provide a valuable public service in giving other bloggers a prime target to aim at. Some can write, most think they can write and one or two, such as Councillor Gavin Ayling, win people over through their essential goodness.

4] The great unwashed, including yours truly, who flock to the blogosphere and rise or fall simply by the quality of their writing and this is the most depressing area of all. Naïve babes in the art of promoting themselves, here is the purest writing of all, great in principle but one thing which stands out about the majority is that a] they can’t write b] they can’t sustain the flashes of brilliance they do have c] work gets in the way.

However, the ones who do rise above the mire, so to speak, have certain common characteristics and these I’ve tried to work into the 10 criteria.

Here ‘tis.