Rob has opened a can of worms. So, for a bit of weekend fun, head over to the link above and chime in. To be fair, this conversation was already hashed out once at Jim Getz’ blog.

Basically, the issue is that the Biblioblog Top 50 is calculated using Alexa statistics. Alexa tracks hits via their toolbar (which anyone may install, free of charge). Truth be told, there is a rather small number of people who use the Alexa toolbar. In addition, the people who install the toolbar are normally those who have some reason to do so (eg, webmasters, geeks, etc). Thus the sample which Alexa works with is not representative of the internet “population” at large.

All of this means that the Biblioblog Top 50 is not a very accurate indication of the number of hits which various biblioblog receive. It is an accurate representation of which blogs Alexa toolbar users are viewing. My guess is that very few biblioblog readers have the Alexa toolbar installed, resulting in a heavily skewed result–though that is only my conjecture, I could be entirely wrong.

So, what to do? My vote is to continue on as is. The Biblioblog Top 50 is mostly for fun, and Alexa allows us to have some fun and see blogs moving on the charts. The movements may not be accurate. One option would be to investigate better (ie, more accurate) way of tracking statistics. I have a feeling, however, that such a thing won’t be easy. The best way would be for one of the more technologically inclined among us (read: a computer geek) to write a stat program which people could then opt into by inserting a small amount of code (similar to Google Analytics) on their blog. The problem with this, as Jim Getz has already pointed out, is that there is such a wide variety of blog software in use by those in the Biblioblog community that making a package that worked with all of them (especially hosted blogs on wordpress.com, blogger or typepad) would probably be impossible.

What do you think?