On July 16, Mario Sundar at Marketing Nirvana posted his "Top 10 Corporate Blogs," having scoured Technorati's rankings to find the ten corporate blogs with the highest number of domains linking to them. Mario did a great job, and I told him I'm willing to help him tabulate such rankings in the future.
As I analyzed the top ten in Mario's list, I saw some problems:
- Several remain unclaimed in Technorati. Tsk, tsk. This includes the official Google blog, which also only has three tags assigned to it out of a potential twenty. C'mon Google, claim your blog and add some tags like "google blog" and "corporate blog" already!
- The number 10 blog, that of The Otter Group, appeared not to have been updated in over 130 days. So I went ahead and pinged Trati for them. You owe me one, guys! Oh, and claim your blog too!
Mario also recently published a list of his 10 favorite CEO blogs. Again, I saw some glaring deficiencies with several of them:
- Only two corporate heads had claimed their blogs in Technorati (Jonathan Schwartz and Craig Newmark)
- I had to ping Schwartz's blog, as Trati hadn't indexed his posts for three months (Jonathan, you owe me one as well!)
- The author of the Return Path CEO blog was all but anonymous - I only discovered the name Matt Blumberg in the tiny copyright notice. No name even on the "about" page.
- The Kevin Lynch (Adobe Chief Architect) blog has not been updated since October 2005 - the month my blog was born!
- iUpload CEO Robin Hopper has posted just once since May 11 of this year. Not good, especially for the head of a corporate blogging software company!
Business Blogging Tip: Once a month, make sure Technorati is indexing all of your blog posts. Simply go to http://technorati.com/ping and refresh Technorati's memory if it's gotten out of date.
Conclusion: I'm not bashing Mario's lists. On the contrary, I thank him for them! My point here is simply that popularity rarely correlates perfectly with quality. So, discussions of "top" business blogs should clarify, as Mario's have, whether "top" means highest-ranked or favorite or best. And somebody needs to take the ball Mario and I and others have started to roll and pick it up and run with it.
In other words, let's set up a corporate blog watch group. What do you say, world?
July 24, 2006 - Update: I've corrected the link to Kevin Lynch's blog to reflect the fact that he is not Adobe's CEO, but rather its Chief Architect. I've also fixed the publication date of this post - now correctly reading July 22 instead of July 24.
Nice work, and very thorough info you've laid out there.
You think some of these companies would be more on the ball, but I guess they need you looking out for them.
Posted by: Darren McLaughlin | July 22, 2006 9:56 AM | Permalink to Comment