What Matters Most To Me When Ranking Educational Blogs (Hint, It's Not Traffic)

Last month the Teach 100 was launched for the purpose of trying to rank the popularity and influence of educational blogs. Today, Larry Ferlazzo drew my attention to another top 100 ranking produced by Onalytica. And it seems like at least once a week I see some kind of list of "the top 50 (or 10 or 100) blogs for teachers of X." In fact, I recently wrote a few posts in which I recommended a handful of blogs for language arts, math, and history teachers

But trying to get on these lists is not why most of us blog. Why we blog is to try to help others learn from our work. So what really matters when you see a list of "influential blogs" isn't how much traffic a blog gets or where it ranks on a list. What matters is whether or not you like the blog and you benefit from reading it. I read lots of blogs that don't appear on any lists yet they're blogs that I count as the most influential to me. My top 100 and your top 100 will always be different and they should be. Otherwise we're all just reading the same stuff and that gets boring after a while.