Blogrollr Two Months Later - My Top Ten

Back in February, I wrote a post asking for a new kind of blogroll. I wanted a blogroll that implicitly determines what I read and shows that. Two days later, I had my request answered and launched Blogrollr on this blog.

Blogrollr is exactly what I asked for. I put their Firefox extension on the computers I use to access the Internet (in my case my laptop and my desktop at work). It records all the blogs I am reading and creates the blogroll.

It took a couple months to get enough data to make the blogroll statistically accurate and I suspect it will get even better over time. I love that if it start reading a blog or stop reading a blog, the blogroll figures that out and I don’t have to do anything.

Here are the top thirty blogs I read:

You’ll see that my wife, The Gotham Gal, is at the very top of the list as it should be. I’ve visited her blog 103 times in the past couple months.

TechCrunch is next. I am not particularly excited about that as I know there are better blogs out there. As I said yesterday, I use aggregators to get to most of the content I consume and TechCrunch does a great job at getting top placement in many of the tech aggregators I use.

My friend Bijan’s blog is next. He posts a song every day as I do. And I tend to comment on many of them. So that activity alone will lead to a lot of daily visits. But his interests are very similar to mine so I’m always finding great stuff on bijansabet.com

Business Insider is next. Like TechCrunch, they do a great job of getting picked up by my favorite tech blog aggregators. But also, they cover the NYC internet scene which is near and dear to my heart.

My brother in law’s blog and my daughter’s blog are tied for fith place with 41 visits each. I read both of them because they are family. But they are also awesome blogs in their own right. Jerry writes about the challenges of running a commercial production company in the age of digital media. If you are in the advertising or film business, you should be reading Jerry too. And Jessica’s basically a photo blogger combining her own fantastic images with great stuff she finds on the web. I sure wish she was on tumblr but she’s figured out how to turn blogger into a tumblog.

Continuing the family thing (family’s first always), my brother’s blog comes in sixth. Jackson (that’s his handle and he’s known to this community that way) is always an entertaining read. If blogrollr had been capturing my visits for the past five years, his blog would probably be in second after Gotham Gal. Jackson’s tagline, “A home for unfinished dreams, delusions of grandeur, and musings on a planet gone wild” is my all time favorite blog tagline.

Venturebeat comes in seventh. They cover the tech beat with a venture capital perspective. And I think they do a great job with their posts. However the loss of MG Seigler to TechCrunch is a big loss for them. I always click over to his posts without even thinking about it.

Kara Swisher comes in eighth. Maybe it’s her obsession with Twitter. Maybe it’s her obsession with finding out the truth before writing a post. Or maybe it’s just that I like her sense of humor. Like MG, I click over to every Kara link I find on the web.

Howard Lindzon comes in ninth. Howard is a mad genius and the single best networker I know in the world of social media. His ruminations on stocks, the market, and the social web are required reading, at least by me.

My partner Albert’s blog comes in tenth. Albert’s a recent convert to blogging but he’s been on a tear lately. If you read Albert’s blog, my blog, the Union Square Ventures blog, Andrew’s blog, and Eric’s blog, you’ll come pretty damn close to hanging out in our office all week.

The rest of the top thirty include some very familiar names, like Brad Feld, Seth Godin, Dave Winer, Steven Johnson, John Battelle, Mo Koyfman, Umair Haque, Peter Kafka, and Roger Ehrenberg. It also includes tech blogs like Mashable, Read Write Web, GigaOm. And the blogs of my portfolio companies like Twitter, Boxee, and Disqus. And some gems you might not know about like Alan Patrick’s blog that he calls Broadstuff.

So that’s what I read the most. Not surprising. Family is at the top, followed by the big tech blogs, the blogs of the people I work with and collaborate with and the blogs of my portfolio companies. I always thought it would look like that, but there is nothing like scrobbling your life and looking at it.

Speaking of scrobbling, over 800 bloggers have put up the Blogrollr widget and started scrobbling their favorite blogs. To date Blogrollr has scrobbled over 500,000 blog visits. If you want to join the party, go visit Blogrollr and get started.

I’ve enjoyed working with the small team behind Blogrollr and they are now building their next project called This Is Feedback, a suggestion box for web services. Check it out.

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Comments (Archived):

  1. curiouslypersistent

    Nice. A “nice to have” would be the ability to assign a qualitative value/vote as there is the danger that high-frequency blogs end up dominating, and the less frequent but high value blogs get pushed to the bottom

    1. fredwilson

      That could be a third tab

  2. bijan

    Thanks!I need to add blogrollr too.

  3. álvaro ortiz

    Don’t know if actually they are tracking which posts you read through Bloglines/Google Reader or other aggregators, but that info should ideally be also included, shouldn’t it? It would be great, as I am sure many of us read a lot of posts without visiting the sources.

    1. fredwilson

      Good pointSince I don’t read through a reader, it doesn’t impact me

      1. Scott Yates

        I had the same thought. The only time I ever click on your blog or most of the others is if I’m going to comment. That’s useful, but if I read something in my Newsgator reader, it doesn’t mean I didn’t like it if I don’t click on it.Newsgator/NetNewsWire would be wise to set up a similar sort of tool.

  4. ppearlman

    lindzon?flash in the pan.

    1. fredwilson

      AgreedJust like twitter

      1. howard lindzon

        i am kvelling. thx fred. high praise and made my week.

      2. George Nimeh

        Did the same person do your and Howard’s avatars?

        1. fredwilson

          Yes, howard did mine

    2. howard lindzon

      too funny. i can fire you. could’nt live without you though so good one.

  5. kevinmarks

    Normalizing by the number of posts they make might give a better signal for which blogs you really like (Google Reader offers both versions, and they are interestingly different).

  6. Jared O'Toole

    Actually never heard of blogrollr. Will have to check it out. seems like an easy to way to keep my blogroll up-to-date.

  7. Adam Wexler

    what about Fred Wilson Dot VC? Don’t make your own cut?

    1. fredwilson

      i read most tumblogs on the tumblr dashboard so that is an issue with this list

  8. Corvida Raven

    Thanks for the info on your Blogrollr widget. I’ll be taking it into consideration to put up on my blog. I’m constantly reading new stuff and sometimes I don’t want to share certain blogs that I read. Is there a way to edit those blogs out?

    1. fredwilson

      yes, you can blacklist blogs, either one time or permanently

  9. Mark Essel

    Each of the blogs I subscribe to help to filter the unrelenting information stream.Does this apply to the blogs I subscribe and read religiously: “You’re the Average of the 5 People You Hang Out with Most” (Jack Canfield?)Just discovered Venturebeat this weekend, I’m falling behind on one of my favorites KevinKelly (http://www.kk.org/thetechni…, he dropped two evolutionary bombs this weekend (incredibly detailed thought inspiring posts). It takes me some time to take it all in and there’s so much out there I want to read.

    1. fredwilson

      YupOur scare resource is attention

  10. MG Siegler

    Appreciate the kind words Fred.

  11. mcluhead

    Thanks for this.

  12. RacerRick

    Where is Hacker News? RSS?

    1. fredwilson

      I read hacker news dailyJust forgot about itI don’t use RSS readersI prefer smart aggregators

  13. Steve

    +1 on the reader integration…this is the first time I can recall in the last few weeks that I’ve actually gone to a blog directly, I consume everything through GReader.Interestingly your last post was all about aggregators…why not one for RSS? (your comment below says you don’t use one). I don’t comment much, which I thought might be your reason?

    1. fredwilson

      I like to read on the web, not in a reader

  14. jsepoch

    I was wondering why i got crazy traffic on a sunday? now i know. thanks for letting me ride your coattails.

    1. fredwilson

      You EARNED it baby!

  15. chrsoz

    FYI Fred, unless ‘Most viewed’ and ‘Recent’ are genuinely the same (doesn’t seem as though it can be the case, since I understood ‘recent’ to be about specific posts) there’s a problem with the operation of the tabs (in all the browsers), as there’s no change as you flick between them (infact, the tabs in the sidebar version of the widget don’t appear to be active).Infact, think I’d change the tabs to ‘Top blogs’ and ‘Recent reads’ to clarify what’s behind each one.Nice data though. And thoroughly agree re Broadstuff. Great content that Alan churns out.

    1. fredwilson

      I noticed that tooIt was working fine but I might have messed it up by putting the same widget in two places on the same page

      1. chrsoz

        Yep, that seems to be the problem. The widget’s fine on other avc posts (when they’e being viewed in full), but is messed up on this one, and on the homepage (since the second widget is visible in the lead part of the post on the homepage).There, my random act of testing is done for the day 🙂

  16. Cameron

    Except for some edge cases, the extension should track the stuff that you are reading in your Google Reader. We will be working on other popular readers in the future.

  17. Cameron_BlogRollr

    So the widget is broken on the home page (and this individual post) because of a css ID issue. We’re looking into ways that this can be fixed. For now, though, you can just click into another of Fred’s posts to see it in action. Any other questions, problems, or suggestions, don’t hesitate to email me. [email protected]

    1. fredwilson

      I love it when my blog breaks stuff!!!

  18. jpmarcum

    great to see this working. would be fun to see a layer showing your visits to trad media sites…

  19. vincetastic

    This is a really great list, I really like TechCrunch, don’t know why you are so hard on it. Anyone can post their own top ten list to our site http://www.toptentopten.com/. The coolest feature is you can let other people vote on the rankings of your list. Thanks for narrowing it down to 30.

    1. fredwilson

      Techcrunch writes things that are not true and they don’t care that they do that. I think that’s a problem and they should stop doing that

  20. jpayne8

    other than techmeme, what other smart aggregators do you use?

    1. fredwilson

      I listed them in another comment to this post. I left out hacker news and real clear politics though as other’s pointed out

  21. leigh

    Jessica’s got an amazing eye for portrait photography.

    1. Butch Decossas

      She definitely does!Butch Decossas

    2. fredwilson

      Thanks. She’s got talent for sure

    1. fredwilson

      Ouch you are so right

  23. ebrittwebb

    Ditto. My #1 source is f​e​e​d​p​r​o​x​y​.​g​o​o​g​l​e​.​c​o​m — not very helpful.Shouldn’t be too hard for BlogRollr to extract at least the feed source from http://www.google.com/reade…