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.

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.