UX Zeitgeist has the tagline “Important books and topics on user experience design, according to the UX community”. It’s a popularity-driven list of what’s hot in the UX (User eXperience design) and IA (Information Architecture) communities.
While we know that “popular” does not always equal “best”, I know or know of the people that are listed on UX Zeitgeist - they are my peers, my mentors, people I want to like and want to be like. I have reason to trust that in this case, at least, popularity is a fair indication of quality.
UX Zeitgeist displays, among other things, blog mentions. Here is my page on UX Zeitgeist - compare it to Steve Krug’s page. Steve is a nice guy and has written a book that has helped a lot of people - I don’t begrudge him his higher ranking in the UX/IA blogosphere, because apart from being a nice guy, I recommend his book to other people, and the better he looks, the better I do for having recommended him. Anyhow, I digress.
This led me to thinking about the IA blogosphere and the technorati-style ranking that I might give for popularity of a set of different IA and IA related blogs. Rather than technorati-style I looked up the Technorati API on ProgrammableWeb. Sure enough, everything there that is needed was there. Being a lazy soul, I looked around for a ready-rolled plugin and came across Douglas Karr’s Technorati Ranking Plugin for WordPress. This plugin displays the ranking for one nominated blog - not quite what I was after, but a useful start. Sadly, owing to an incompatible curl library here, it didn’t work. The automagical solution is still to come (and if you have any thoughts, please leave a comment - I’ll put it on my project list - a thought that occurs to me is that a “display the rankings of all blogs listed with Technorati by this tag” plugin might be handy).
OK, so, the manual way. A Technorati search on information architecture yields over 46,000 results. Narrowing it to “information architecture” yields over 4,000 results. Ack. From this result set - blog rankings for those blogs who have posted over the last 24 hours:
- A List Apart is currently ranked 97
- Information Architects Japan is ranked 1,903
- Partial Recall is ranked 318,212
- Between Us:Audrey Carr is ranked 584,159
- This blog (Facibus Reviews) is ranked 1,396,735 (some ground to make up there, but I’ll be kind to myself, I’ve only been posting for 15 days now!)
- Journalism Architects at USF is ranked 3,083,296
I know that there are a lot of other IA blogs out there that haven’t shown up in this result set. They include:
- Jakon Nielsen’s Alertbox: ranked 463 (while not strictly IA as such, covers a lot of common ground with IA)
- Steve Collins’ acidlabs.org/blog: ranked 25,352
- Dan Saffer’s ODannyBlog: ranked 58,606
- Donna Maurer’s blog: ranked 80,218
- Matt’s Musings: ranked 398,420
This is not an exhaustive list by any means - there are a lot more IA blogs out there. If/when I get my API act together, the list might be automagical. In the mean while, you can keep an eye on the top IA blogs according to Technorati by performing an authority search on blogs tagged information-architecture.
I’ve made a modification to the Technorati Rank plugin this afternoon that fixes an issue with opening and saving the Cache file. Perhaps that was the issue you’re having!
Warmest Regards,
Doug
Thanks Doug,
appreciated
I will give it another go. What I eventually want to do is specify a technorati tag and display the comparitive rankings of all blogs that contain the tag - your plugin is the closest thing I’ve seen to a ready-rolled solution. If I get anywhere with the extension I’ll let you know so that you can incorporate it into your code if you want.
Best regards, Andrew