MindanaoBloggers.com scores again

Janette Toral, in her ongoing projects to bring recognition to various entities who are making their mark in the Philippine ICT arena, has published the next round of Top 100 Philippine blogs. Take a look here.

As you might see, MindanaoBloggers.com is again on the list of the Philippines Top 100 Blogs by Blog Juice. Janette has chosen Blog Juice to measure blogs’ ranks. Our community blog’s nutritional value is 3.6 — I gather this is pretty high. And in Janette’s list, we’re at #20!

Blog Juice is calculated using these 4 ingredients: Technorati, Alexa, Bloglines, and (of course) incoming links. The first, well, I suppose it’s a respectable source of information. But Alexa and Bloglines? Aren’t those two dependent on particular software being used by Web surfers?

As far as I know, Alexa measures site traffic, etc. using data gathered from users who have installed their browser toolbar. Meaning, from people like me (I don’t have their toolbar installed), they don’t get anything at all. And Bloglines is the same thing: if you don’t use their blogrolling service, then they can’t measure anything from you.

So why are these two being considered as reliable metrics?

Simple. I think maybe in the United States, Alexa and Bloglines are heavily used, and so are looked at as good sources of information on site traffic and activity. Knowing this — and only if my assumption is correct — then perhaps using Blog Juice to determine the top blogs in the Philippines does not paint a very accurate picture?

But in Janette’s defense, there really is NO  measuring stick that absolutely every  blogger will accept. Not even Google’s PageRank (which I’m surprised Janette did not include as a metric in her Top 100 calculation). No matter what set of criteria you use to come up with a top list, there will be those who won’t be happy with it.

So my take on this is, let’s view Janette’s — as well as other people’s — Top 100 list as a gauge by which we can measure our own blogging activities. We are not being forced to accept this list as gospel truth, but it does present a pretty good idea of what’s what and who’s who in the Filipino blogosphere.

Congratulations to all bloggers of Mindanao!

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