Technorati's most popular blogs: Where are the new and exciting blogs?

The introduction of Techmeme's leaderboard last week engineered a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about the usefulness of such lists, and whether the new list was an improvement on Technorati's long standing top 100 most popular blogs (I even went so far as to ponder a few words myself). Thinking about these lists I decided to investigate how the Technorati popular blogs list has changed over the years, after all, if the blogosphere is a vibrant community with new exciting entrants we should see numerous changes and the emergence of innovative blogs...unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case (at least amongst the top 25 blogs).

Looking at the current top 25 blogs finds 13 of them already established in the top 100 of 28th December 2005, and of the other 12 all but three were in existence before 2006. The three 'relatively' new entrants are:
Mashable
icanhascheezburger.com
Peterandrej
...and of these only icanhascheezburger (which is without doubt the most pointless of the three) was established this year.

There could be a number of reasons for the lack of new entrants:
1)The blogosphere is dead (or at least dying), with few new and exciting entrants.
2)Blogs rarely emerge quickly, but rather take time to become established.
3)The lists are driving the traffic as much as they are reflecting the traffic.

Personally I don't think the blogosphere is dead just yet, but with the traffic being driven heavily by the relatively few 'top blog' lists a perception may be given that it is a place where only long-serving bloggers get any traffic and potential new bloggers won't be tempted to join the debate. To encourage growth and participation, maybe Technorati should include a chart of fast climbing blogs.

Top of the Techs: The Techmeme Leaderboard

Its not surprising that all the big bloggers and news sources are discussing the Techmeme Leaderboard, after all, it's all about them: the sources most frequently posted to techmeme. The obvious comparison for such a leaderboard is with Technorati's top 100 blogs, and those that have found their ranking improved are unsurprisingly enthusiastic (e.g., Scripting News
and TechCrunch), but for every winner there is also a loser who is likely to be less enthusiastic.

Lists of the top 100 lists are always interesting, whether it is books, music, or web sites, but they don't necessarily mean very much: only a fool really believes that the Harry Potter books are great works of literature, and the top selling records are by the best artists. This does not mean I don't subscribe to many of the blogs and news sources on Techmeme's Leaderboard, merely that these are by no means the only ones I subscribe to. There are many highly specialised blogs that are never likely to make it onto such a list, but are nonetheless of great interest to a certain proportion of individuals. Blogging is about enabling the opinions of many people to be heard rather than the few, the creation of a Top 100 focuses on the opinions of the few.

Scoble mentions a lack of bloggers on the list, and suggests that it may be another indicator that blogging is dieing. Personally I don't believe blogging is dieing, it is merely changing. Whilst snippets of news and information will be shared by the micro-blogging format of Twitter, and established bloggers will gather together within one brand (e.g., Read/WriteWeb), there will continue to be a core set of bloggers for whom the traditional blog is the best way of sharing their thoughts and information.

Whilst many people enjoy looking at top 100 lists (or top-whatever), it is important that we don't put too much store in them, and remember that there is a lot of sites beyond that top 100, and for that Technorati is much better than TechMeme.