Last month, Todd And published the Power 150, a listing of the top 150 marketing blogs in the US.
While some have criticized the list because of its US centricity – I can think of a good half dozen marketing blogs in Europe and Asia that ought to be in such a list – the Power 150 is a useful resource.
What makes this list one worth giving your attention to is that each blog is ranked according to aggregated analysis based on Google page rank, Technorati ranking, the number of RSS feed subscribers via Bloglines, plus a bit of Todd’s own secret measurement sauce.
The only niggle I have is that all the blogs included are described as marketing blogs, yet include a number that are 100% to do with advertising or public relations and not much about marketing. If you take out those blogs to leave the ‘pure’ marketing ones, some of the rankings would then make more sense to me.
(We could get into a discussion on how to define marketing – for the record: PR is not a subservient part of marketing – so weigh in in the comments if you wish.)
The Power 150 has just become more useful:
[…] the Power 150 is [now] a living, breathing list and a much more resourceful tool. You can search and subscribe by keyword, browse the combined ‘River of News’ feed, or openly explore feed-to-feed. The “subscribe to your search” feature is ultra-slick in that you can grab the RSS URL for your custom search and instantly see when your keyword is mentioned by blogs in the Power 150.
While I found the Grazr-powered search very slow when I tried it, the ability to subscribe to a single RSS feed covering 150 such blogs is a real boon.
Nice work, Todd.
5 responses to “Get 150 marketing blogs in one go”
Nice post, Neville. Fair and balanced.
I’ve also noticed the Grazr response time to be slow at times, which is probably due to the many parts running the engine behind the scenes. It all starts with my Newsgator-generated OPML that is fed to mySyndicaat in order to create a massive combined RSS feed, or river of news. That feed was Feedburner-ized and gurgled by Grazr to create what I affectionately call the kitchen sink. RSS and OPML expert Marjolein Hoekstra did an amazing job orchestrating all the back-end components and adding a few extra bells and whistles.
As for the US-centricity of the list, I don’t know code, so I had to focus it for the sake of time and sanity. Like you, I can easily think of a dozen or so European blogs that I would love to see on the list. If I was an expert coder, I would have automated the Power 150 ranking algorithm and included all English-language marketing blogs.
While the name says top marketing blogs for brevity, the Power 150 includes all marketing-related or marketing communications blogs. So, as you mentioned, it does feature several blogs that are exclusively advertising, PR, etc. Ultimately, I thought the diversity of the list added value and made it a much more resourceful tool for marketers.
Over time, I hope the Power 150 continues to evolve and perhaps grow to include a larger pool of blogs. In the meantime, thanks for noticing all the hard work we put into it. -Todd
Thanks, Todd, appreciate the explanation re why US only. An opportunity, perhaps, for someone to add to what you’ve started. It’s a great resource.
Responsible for the technical part of Todd’s search engine, I’m grateful for your feedback about the less-than-optimal performance of my RSS mash-up. Todd already pointed out in his comment that I combined several web services to create this Grazr application. Yesterday night it appeared I might be able to exclude one particular service from the chain, causing the rather remarkable performance improvement that I noticed just now after implementing the change. How would it sound to you if you would visit the Power 150 Kitchen Sink page one more time, perform a search and report your findings here? What other functionality would you appreciate seeing in an RSS application like this, Neville?
Thanks for your input,
Marjolein
Thanks, Marjolein, for that additional information. I’ve not had time to check as you suggest; will do and comment again here.
[…] Again, nice work, Todd! […]