In developing our "Top UK Blogs" rankings, we have asked three key questions of the websites in our database:
Is it a blog? This question has become increasingly difficult to answer over the past couple of years, as the "social web" has evolved and expanded leading to hybrid social media forms and the unreliability or previously definitive characteristics such as blogrolls and trackbacks.
Cision Research looks for three key qualifiers in a blog: content that appears in reverse chronological order; initiating content created by by an individual or collective of recognised individuals; and the ability for users to comment on the initiating content.
Is the blog from the UK? Few UK websites use a tell-tale .co.uk domain, few are hosted in the US and many aim to participate in global conversation - it's not that easy identifying a UK blog.
For the purposes of this list, if a blog can be regarded as the creation of a UK resident Cision will consider it a UK web property.
Is it a "top" UK blog? Our point of departure is the assumption that a blog's influence is represented by the amount of people seeing it and the potential for it to be referenced elsewhere (including in search engine results).
A longlist was therefore compiled using an algorithm to reflect two key measures of web popularity, inbound links and traffic measured in monthly unique users. For each blog these elements were weighted to achieve a balance between measurable impact to date (traffic) and likelihood of future impact (links as a proxy for search visibility). The longlist was then reduced down to a Top 50, with each entry re-evaluated according to additional metrics, notably update frequency and total number of posts.
In seeking to make our social media research more robust, we are constantly evaluating new data sources and new measurement criteria. By testing and re-testing the identity and weighting of the variables in our algorithm, Cision aims to make our measure of online influence as accurate – and as useful – as possible.
The social media data on which this research depends were provided by Radian6 technology and feature in CisionPoint and Cision Social Media services.