Top 100+ SharePoint Blogs Behind the Report

Posted on May 19, 2008 by Joel Oleson

Something I’ve done more since leaving Microsoft is catch up on blogging and reading MVP and other SharePoint community blogs.

My most recent freeware RSS client is "snarfer" from snarfware. It had the most downloads on download.com for free RSS readers. It’s forced me to get a bit organized around my feed consumption. In my attempts to find the best SharePoint blogs I came across a post which listed the top 100 Analyst feeds.

In my various searching and digging I came across a few good aggregated feeds, here are the best aggregations I found. SharePoint is a common term across facebook, twitter, blogs and searches.

SharePoint Aggregated Feeds:

On Demand Mirror of many SharePoint blogs (Feeds added by Request) – (ex.. Mark Harrison, AC, Chand, End User, Bob Fox, etc…) http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mirror/rss.aspx
SharePoint Experts Bloggers (Dustin, Heather Solomon, Todd Baginksy, Matt Passannante) (low volume) http://www.sharepointblogs.com/MainFeed.aspx?GroupID=7&Type=AllBlogs

Minsharp Blogger feed of their instructors (Bill, Todd, Ben, etc…)
http://mindsharpblogs.com/MainFeed.aspx

U2U Trainer blog feed (Patrick, Kevin, etc…) http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/U2U/default.aspx

SharePoint MVPs

SharePoint MVPs blogs only (English only/Medium Volume) http://feeds.feedburner.com/sharepointmvpblogs

SharePoint related Blogging MS Employees

Individual Blogs (Arpan, Paul Andrew, Chris Johnson, Charran, Mike Watson, etc…) http://feeds.feedburner.com/sharepointmsblogs
Team Blogs (SharePoint, ECM, Designer, etc..) http://feeds.feedburner.com/sharepointmsteamblogs

SharePoint Community Lists and OPML (very verbose)

SharePoint Community Bloggers from Mark Kruger Bloglines’ SharePoint OPML (define:OPML) or view Public Bloglines

Daniel Larson shared his OPML with me from newsgator. Very rich on the MVP side.

I took a stab at trying to put together a 100 Top SharePoint Blogs based on Technorati and was planning on using some influence from Google Page Rank, but it ultimately was tough to integrate the two, so I’ve sorted by Technorati Rank. First let me caveat this list as incomplete. This was taken from Mark Kruger’s old list of SharePoint blogs, the old most comprehensive one that I knew of, and then blogs from various MVPs blog rolls. This list need not be complete. This is a stab at getting something that I think will become more useful in the future. Don’t shoot the messenger. Please hold your harsh words with a better attempt at the essense or spirit of what I was going after… ultimately a list of bloggers that we can subscribe to, to understand what’s going on in the space… right?

So after getting this huge list of close to 200 SharePoint Community blogs I tried to think like a developer would. How could I automate getting some useful information on these blogs. You know I’m not much of a developer, so this should be interesting 🙂 I figured there had to be a web service to gather the data and sure enough…

For Google Page Rank I simply used a page which allows you to check 10 at a time. Obviously they are hitting a service in the background. You can add a simple snippet to your own site to show page rank and other ranking sites:

<a href="http://www.wholinks2me.com/" title="Click here to see who’s linking to my site.">Who links to my website?</a>

For Technorati, a service I’ve ended up putting most of my trust in, I dig some digging and found a very useful web service, A Developer API called BlogInfo. Here’s some information on the service. Simply pass in the URL and a key which you can get by signing up on Technorati. (note this service has a 500 per day query limit). I was thinking about putting this in some kind of page, but the 500 per day limit prevents that. The useful thing I’ve found with httprequest.vbs is you can hit any web page on the command line. Very useful for warmups and for automation, you can grab that in the warm up zip attachment on my old blog.

"The bloginfo query provides info on what blog, if any, is associated with a given URL.

The call is made using a REST-ful interface. Send either a HTTP GET or a HTTP POST to http://api.technorati.com/bloginfo?key=%5Bapikey%5D&url=%5Bblog url] with mandatory parameters "key" and "url" and one optional parameter to request various formats.

Here’s what the XML output looks like:

Success

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- generator="Technorati API version 1.0 /bloginfo" -->
<!DOCTYPE tapi PUBLIC "-//Technorati, Inc.//DTD TAPI 0.02//EN" "http://api.technorati.com/dtd/tapi-002.xml">
<tapi version="1.0">
<document>
<result>
  <url>[URL]</url>
  <weblog>
    <name>[blog name]</name>
    <url>[blog URL]</url>
    <rssurl>[blog RSS URL]</rssurl>
    <atomurl>[blog Atom URL]</atomurl>
    <inboundblogs>[inbound blogs]</inboundblogs>
    <inboundlinks>[inbound links]</inboundlinks>
    <lastupdate>[date blog last updated]</lastupdate>
    <rank>[blog ranking]</rank>
    <lang></lang>
    <foafurl>[blog foaf URL]</foafurl>
  </weblog>
  <inboundblogs>[inbound blogs]</inboundblogs>
  <inboundlinks>[inbound links]</inboundlinks>
</result>
</document>
</tapi>

Here's an example of what I put together using Notepad and Excel (x200 lines).

cscript.exe httprequest.vbs GET http://api.technorati.com/bloginfo?
key=1347df90&url=http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewat/ /out:1.XML //B
cscript.exe httprequest.vbs GET http://api.technorati.com/bloginfo?
key=1347df90&url=http://giraudyp.perso.cegetel.net/ /out:2.XML //B
cscript.exe httprequest.vbs GET http://api.technorati.com/bloginfo?
key=1347df90&url=http://mikewalsh.bilsimser.com /out:3.XML //B

The example above is all put in a single .cmd file and then I pass in the method "GET" with the URL to httprequest.vbs which accepts a URL as a parameter then output to a filename. Here’s what the output looks like with real data in it.

We all love AC, here’s the XML output for his. I did find that the UTF-8 encoding was sometimes problematic and I ended up parsing out some of the headers that I found detracting, then pulled them all together and doing some munging and proprietary Excel skills to put this in a table.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!– generator="Technorati API version 1.0" –>
<!DOCTYPE tapi PUBLIC "-//Technorati, Inc.//DTD TAPI 0.02//EN" "http://api.technorati.com/dtd/tapi-002.xml">
<tapi version="1.0">
<document>
    <result>
        <url>http://andrewconnell.com/blog/</url>
                    <weblog>
                <name> Andrew Connell [MVP MOSS] </name>
                <url>http://andrewconnell.com/blog</url>
                <rssurl>http://feeds.feedburner.com/AndrewConnell</rssurl>
                <atomurl></atomurl>
                <inboundblogs>194</inboundblogs>
                <inboundlinks>495</inboundlinks>
                <lastupdate>2008-05-16 19:40:04 GMT</lastupdate>
                <rank>36939</rank>
                <authors>
                        <author>
                        <username>aconnell</username>
                        <name>Andrew Connell</name>
                        <description>Microsoft MVP for MCMS, I’m a .NET developer focusing on Microsoft Office System solutions.</description>
                        <url>http://technorati.com/people/technorati/aconnell</url>
                        <photourl>http://static.technorati.com/progimages/photo.jpg?uid=109121</photourl>
                         </author>
                 </authors>
            </weblog>
                            <inboundblogs>194</inboundblogs>
                            <inboundlinks>495</inboundlinks>
            </result>
</document>
</tapi>

The most important things to note are some of the blogs returned nothing. What does this mean? This means that technorati hasn’t crawled the blog, or it has no incomming blogs, or no links. Technorati is by far not the only way to rate blogs, but it really is focused on some of the key algorithms that I find useful. As you look at updating frequency, links and blogs pointing to your site, you’ll see the most important is the number of unique inboundblogs. Blog rolls are quite important in defining the importance and ranking of blogs. When I first started looking at my blog on technorati,the best I got was in the under 10,000 somewhere around 8900, and that was when they were tracking 3 million blogs. Now they are tracking nearly 10 million blogs and I’m lucky to be as high as I am. That blog will obviously continue to drop as people update their blog rolls to my new blog at http://www.sharepointjoel.com and the update frequency drops.

More info in the following blog with the rating table! Please don’t hate me for this… Add comments in this and the next post for missing blogs that have 10 plus inbound blogs. I’d like to do an update to this in a couple of months. We can call this a first stab, and unofficial… giving more of a chance to capture a more verbose list. Any comments on the unbiased, but automated ratings, I’m open to that as well. Check out blogged.com, they have some ratings on ~75 SharePoint blogs, but I found it incomplete and needing to be updated. Again, no offense to what you’ll see in the next post 🙂

Your friend… Joel