Shortly after I started this blog, I began looking for ways to promote it. One way that a lot of people recommended was to get listed with a blog directory, like BlogTopList or TopBlogging. So I submitted my site to a bunch of directories, hoping for a small boost in traffic. What I got was basically nothing. I mean, I might get one visit a week from each of these sites. I even tried putting their banners near the top of my template and writing posts encouraging my readers to click on them so that I'd move up in the rankings. And I did move up slightly, for a short time, which resulted in me getting maybe 2 visits a week.
Presumably these sites are helping someone, but it's not me. And it irked me that the rankings seemed to be based entirely on the amount of traffic that a blog generates for that site. In other words, a popular site gets a high ranking, because it's popular, thereby making it more popular. That's like a newspaper telling you to go see Spider-Man 3 because it made $300 million so it must be pretty good.
Take the top ranked blog in the "Humor" category at TopBlogging, for example. It's called Really Funny Jokes, and it features copied and pasted jokes like this:
A girl sat sobbing in the police station. "I was raped by an Idiot!!" she wailed.Gee, that's a knee-slapper, isn't it? Definitely worthy of the highest ranked Humor blog on the Interwebs.
"How do you know he was an Idiot?" the detective asked.
"I had to help him!" the girl replied.
"Why isn't there some kind of site that actually makes an effort to identify some of the funniest blogs out there?" I thought. There had to be something like that, right? Wrong. Topblogging, TopBlogArea, BlogTopList, TopHatBlogList, TobogganBlogLogList, TobleroneBlogArea... they're all the same: Lists of blogs that are popular, in order by their popularity, so that more people can experience the joys of blonde jokes and that Youtube video with the monkey sticking his finger in his butt.
So I started Humor-Blogs.com, which was at first just a list of blogs that I personally found funny. Then I ran across BlogLaughs, a blog run by a guy who had put together a team of volunteer reviewers to review blogs for their humor content. He had done a lot of blog reviews over the course of a year or so, but was getting pretty burned out on the project. Part of the problem was that hardly anybody knew about his site. One of the ironies of the Internet is that a worthless site like TopBlogging gets a lot of traffic because a lot of web sites link to it, whereas a site like BlogLaughs, that provided an actual service, languishes in obscurity.
I took over the reviewing responsibilities from BlogLaughs and incorporated them in the Humor-Blogs ranking system. I didn't want H-B to be just another popularity contest, but I also didn't want it to wither and die like BlogLaughs. So I compromised, creating a ranking based partly on reviews by (hopefully) disinterested reviewers and partly on traffic.
I have, of course, gotten criticism for both aspects of this ranking system. "What does traffic have to do with how funny a blog is?" people ask. Well, first of all, in reality there is a (slight) correlation between traffic and quality. Really Funny Jokes isn't remarkable by any means, but I imagine it's better than the 200th ranked blog on TopBlogging, and Spider-Man 3 was at least better than The Hottie and the Nottie. Second, basing the score partly on popularity makes it harder for someone to try to game the system by getting all his/her friends to sign up as reviewers. And finally, there's the reality that without traffic, H-B would be worthless both to people looking for blogs and for bloggers trying to boost their traffic.
Some people ask whether there is some kind of qualification process for reviewers, as if there were a line of people waiting to be given the opportunity to write blog reviews for which they will receive exactly nothing in terms of compensation. In reality, there are some 400 blogs waiting to be reviewed, and only a handful of reviewers, so a better question would be, "Is there some kind of qualification process that a blog has to go through before it can get reviewed?"
And then there are those who talk about how "self-serving" Humor-Blogs.com is. They see bloggers begging their readers to click the H-B link on their blog and assume that I'm somehow making out like a bandit. And to be fair, I guess I am. Check out a sampling of my referral traffic from H-B to MattressPolice.com:
That's pretty typical: Five out of twenty referrals came from Humor-Blogs.com. I get a lot of traffic from H-B, unlike the other blog directories. I'm ranked #4 on H-B and #9 on TopBlogging, but do you see any referrals from TopBlogging on that list?
So yes, H-B has worked out pretty well for me, but only -- and here's the key -- because I'm a Humor-Blogs.com member who works hard to stay near the top of the rankings. I can only assume that the referral traffic for Seven Seeds, Crummy Church Signs and 15 Minute Lunch look pretty much like mine. So yes, H-B is self-serving, if the "self" you're talking about is the members who are writing funny blog posts and working hard to promote the site.
In any case, the point of this long winded diatribe is to explain my motivations in creating and continuing to run Humor-Blogs.com... and why some things with the site are going to have to change.
Realistically, we're never going to be able to review all of the blogs that are in the queue. Blogs are being added faster than we can review them. Additionally, many blogs that have been reviewed may have changed significantly since their review (or are now defunct). This diminishes the meaningfulness of the rankings. Not incidentally, I have way too much other stuff going on to keep devoting my time to blog reviews.
So I'm hereby retiring from the blog review business. We'll post the reviews that have been submitted already, but after that we're not going to review any more blogs.
I'm hoping to come up with a more automated system, similar to Digg or StumbleUpon, where users can give a "thumbs up" and maybe a short review for specific blog posts, but it will probably be several weeks before I can have anything like that in place. Any suggestions are welcome; I'll either incorporate you suggestions or explain in a future post why I was unable to. Whatever system I eventually end up using, it will be an attempt to maintain the balance between popularity and reader opinions as a means of ranking blogs.
Ok, enough serious crap. I'll be back tomorrow with a post detailing everything you never wanted to know about Captain America. See you then!
Labels: Blogging, Humor-blogs.com, Serious Stuff
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