A more reliable Indonesia blog ranking system?

Following some discussions in Media-ide and Talking Points about Indonesia’s blog rankings, Patung promised that he would address some of the criticisms in Indonesia Matters‘ blog rankings, which, imperfect as it was, was still the best indicator of a blog’s influence in the Indonesian blogosphere.

Patung‘s made good his promise and the main difference seems to be that he now uses Feedburner rather than Bloglines as one of the parameters. It also adds back Tweets and although it still includes Technorati, the information is not computed in (which is about right since Technorati is on the decline and not relied on much by bloggers to get an indication of a blog’s influence)

Unspun doesn’t know the technicalities of all those ranking stuff but the new list (in which Unspun‘s ranked 10th overall and 2nd in the English blog rankings. woohoo) seems to be more reliable than the last one, which was a bit suss because people who rarely updated the blogs for month still stood quite high in its ranking system.

So the current top 10 are: Indonesia Matters, Anang, Raditya Dika, Ndoro Kakung, Budi Rahardjo, Media-ide, Chicken Strip, Enda Nasution,  Blog Doctor, and yours truly, Unspun.

Unspun‘s sure that there will be many who will quibble with Patung but as in a recent conversation with some bloggers one of the things we discovered was how difficult it is to set the parameters for blog influence. Do you count the number of visitors, the number of links, the number of conversations, the level of engagements or what. We concluded that perhaps the best system would be a combination of objective parameters and a subjective decision, perhaps by a panel of prominent bloggers, on who’s influential and who not. Even then the garrulous would find grounds to quarrel with the outcome.

Speaking of garrulous, Unspun‘s sure that the new rankings, especially where the English blogs are concerned, would certainly put some noses out of joint. Said persons would then likely profess to the world that they really, really place no importance on such superfluous things in life as blog rankings as they write for themselves and not for some online popularity sweepstakes. LOL if you should hear such protestations as methinks such bloggers protest too much. They are as vain as any of us (yes, Unspun included) bloggers when it comes to rankings. Even when we do not take such things too seriously we gotta admit that some sort of recognition feels good, even if we labor for love.