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A Joel’s "Top 100" and "Top 10 SharePoint Blog" badge will be coming soon…

Note: I’ve posted this post for comparative reasons with the previous post.  Apologizes for any mistakes or missing blogs.  Also please note that some blogs were removed that were considered aggregated feeds or didn’t primarily contain original content such as mirrors, news or republished links.  Although this update may look like a major update, additional updates may be made over the course of the week with a refresh of blog listings around August/September 08.

About RSS and Subscriptions… Although some of the best indicators of blog popularity are unique blogs that point to your blog, and links that point to your blog… RSS subscribers are a very telling story.  For this reason I’ve included some stats from Bloglines.com an online RSS reader.  I assume these stats don’t account for even 5% of readership, but can give an indication of popularity.  A more ideal number would be the actual feed statistics such as through feedburner.com.  Unfortunately, these statistics are only available if they are published by the owner.  I for example, as recent as May 14th had 3,516 subscribers  to my feedburner feed, while looking at bloglines you see only 75 as online web based subscribers happening to be using the bloglines interface to subscribe (it’s amazing how many hundreds I can lose over a weekend). Another 29 are subscribed directly to the old feed of the archive site (hence the calculated number in the table). 

According to Andrew Connell’s feedburner stats on his site he has around ~3200 subscriptions, while Bil Simser has ~2500.  It’s fun to analyze.  I hope you enjoy this data and understand this is all in good fun.  Here’s an interesting break down by client consumption.  You can see what small percentage (2%) is taken by bloglines with Outlook 2007 (28%) and Google Feedfetcher (27%) being the two most popular RSS clients for my feed (the very Pro already upgraded Office 2007 client with Outlook 2007).  Very savy indeed.

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

A special once in a lifetime event is happening this summer.  Shane Young and I are joining forces to bring you a special variation of SharePoint Professional Administration 401 we’re currently calling "The SharePoint Administrators Survival Camp" with much more depth and much more detail.  We’ve revamped the agenda and added a day.  We’re hoping to attract the real die hard SharePoint Admins that want to come and rub shoulders with us, and have real meaty conversations around disaster recovery, authentication, and share real world troubleshooting horror and success stories with us around the camp fire.  Ok, maybe no campfire, just the fire from the Mirage.  Yes, we’re going to do this amazing event in Las Vegas, July 14-18, 2008. 

I wanted you to hear it here first.  I am partnering up with the Ted Pattison Group to develop and deliver some training.  The TPG website hasn’t yet been updated with this info, but I’ll add the link here when it does become available.  I’m sure it will fill fast.

I bet they’d let you get on a pre-sales list…  (In addition, I noticed coupons on the home page for $400 discounts, not sure how long those will be there.)

1(866) 475-4440

Registration Now Open for SharePoint Survival Camp for Admins.

info@TedPattison.net

I’ll ask for forgiveness later.  More details to come.

Joel