New blog database shows who links to your blog and lets you watch your rank in the blog hierarchy; and provides a for-pay service to track your blog ranking.
What I like: lets you discover inbound links.
What I don’t like: treats blogs like a high school popularity contest.
The single-peaked popularity ranking obscures “subcommunity” patterns — there are knots of java bloggers and political bloggers and Austin bloggers; and plenty of bloggers who participate in multiple communities (like physical life).
When Blogdex started picking up a lot of Persian blogs in its top rankings, the designer considered reducing his coverage to english-language blogs only. That’s exactly wrong. The right thing to do is to reveal blog blogcommunities, and identify leading voices in those subcommunities. Hmm… Valdis Krebs probably knows how to do this…
And raw popularity seems beside the point. Some of my favorite blogs are low-traffic blogs from people who don’t do much self-promotion. This blog is a place to write about the various topics I’m interested in; not filtered by which topics are most popular.
I agree blogs are a great place to learn about all types of information. I discovered some great ideas about investing in penny stocks through the stock blogs. One of the things I found was that you need to do lots of specific research about the companies before investing, and there are certain things to look for. One of the sites that I found offers some good information is Pennystocks.com