This blog is not yet three months old but I am pleased to report that it is off to a good start. According to Technorati’s rankings, JayPGreene.com is attracting more readers than the American Federation of Teachers’ blog, Edwize, more than Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier’s, Bridging Differences hosted by Education Week, more than the Reason Foundation’s Out of Control, and the Center for Education Reform’s Edspresso. It significantly trails the educouple of Eduwonk and Eduwonkette as well as Cato at Liberty (although that’s not primarily an education blog). Flypaper, which started about the same time as this blog, is also off to a good start. The Queen of education blogs seems to be Joanne Jacobs.
Here are the Technorati rankings (as of this morning) of education sites that seem to share some of the same audience as this blog. By no means is this a comprehensive list of education blogs. And I have no idea how reliable or meaningful Technorati’s rankings really are. I’d continue blogging no matter what the rankings were because it’s fun. I imagine the same is true of most others.
- Cato at Liberty 3,662
- Joanne Jacobs 3,709
- Eduwonkette 27,419
- Eduwonk 30,876
- Flypaper 95,943
- Jay P. Greene 104,227
- Bridging Differences 107,924
- D-Ed Reckoning 107,924
- AFT’s Edwize 116,227
- Edspresso 123,039
- Out of Control 123,039
- Core Knowledge 127,851
- Sherman Dorn 151,703
- EdBizBuzz 184,730
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
So I give up- what do the numbers mean?
The numbers are supposed to be the rank of the blog, with 1 being the highest ranked. I’ve heard from a friend who is more informed about all of this than I am that there are problems with these Technorati numbers. He says that they are distorted by being hosted by a site with significant traffic, which might artificially improve rankings for the Ed Week hosted sites Eduwonkette and Bridging Differences and for the Cato hosted Cato at Liberty. He also says that these are “authority” rankings, not readership rankings, where authority has something to do with how many other sites link to you. His bottom line is that jaypgreene.com is actually doing much better than these rankings would suggest. I have no way of assessing what he says, but since he says nice things he is certainly correct.
[…] of the most interesting (and voluminous) education research in the country???today published the most important finding??of his career: When it comes to readership, Cato@Liberty.org crushes all other education […]
Using a different metric, “feed subscribers”, below are Google Feed Rankings for the blogs above and some other K-12 affairs blogs.
1. Cato at Liberty 470
2. Eduwonk 273
3. Class Struggle (Jay Mathews) 213
4. Education Sector 183
5. Quick and the Ed 169
6. Joanne Jacobs 163
7. Eduwonkette 142
8. Edspresso 135
9. Bridging Differences 127
10. D-Ed Reckoning 113
11. Out of Control 112
12. Education Policy Blog 107
13. Edwize 87
14. Flypaper 60
15. Sherman Dorn 49
16. Jay P. Greene 46
17. This Week in Education (Alexander Russo) 36
18. EdBizBuzz 29
19. Core Knowledge 14
These rankings are based on the total # of RSS feed subscribers, and I believe these are subscribers only using Google Reader… I’m pretty sure these numbers do not represent all RSS subscribers to a given blog or column. That’s an important caveat to make since there are a number of other feed readers out there.
I think the Google Rankings still offer a good impression of subscriber reach for K-12 blogs and columns. I wouldn’t expect a systematic bias for one blog over another based on what RSS feed reader one uses.
On the other hand, the “age” for a given blog feed is an important consideration when judging the above rankings and numbers…
Relatively new blogs (e.g. this one), or blogs who have recently changed hosts/feeds (e.g. Russo’s TWIE), maybe should be given some asterisks as they ramp up subscribers in their first year or so. My guess is that about 6-12 months is required for these kinds of blogs to penetrate by word of mouth and to be on a level playing field (in terms of awareness) with older blogs. A full year of blogging, exchanging links, exchanging comments with other blogs, buzz at conferences, publications, events, etc, I think should do the trick to get the proper word out.
Quick correction, Eduwonk has 466 subscribers, not 273…
As an education PR person, let me see if I can add anything – accurate counts of site traffic are notoriously hard to come by. There are lots of reasons for this, but it’s really hard to say definitively “blog X has more traffic than blog Y” unless there is a clear difference between several of these metrics. Paul’s caveats about the RSS feeds are good ones, to which I’d add another: that only counts who has added your feed, not necessarily the number of people visiting regularly. Also, some populations might be more inclined to use RSS than others, which would skew the results (though I don’t know that I can think of compelling arguments for the bloggers listed).
Jay, your friend’s comment is, I believe, mostly correct. The authority rankings take into account things like back-links, which a big site might encourage, either purposefully or just because you have bloggers who know each other. For what it’s worth I believe they also take into account things like number of comments.
I’m not sure how the big media clipping services do it, but I know I’ve seen them pick up Cato, Joanne, Eduwonk, and the Ed Week blogs.
Basically your blog has definitely grown impressively over the last year, and your blog is most likely bigger than some (CK, Ed Biz), smaller than some (Joanne, Cato), and in the same neighborhood as others. Think of these numbers as having somewhat large margins of error.
[…] whose data analysis often contradicted Department of Education claims, signed off this morning. Her many fans are now declaring a collective […]
[…] of the most interesting (and voluminous) education research in the country—today published the most important finding of his career: When it comes to readership, Cato@Liberty.org crushes all other education […]