Classical Convert

28 Responses to “The Top 50 Classical Blogs, Using 4 Different Methods”

1. Chris Foley Says:
   
   April 5th, 2008 at 6:09 am

   This is probably the classical blogosphere’s most relevant ranking list and thanks for taking the time to compile it.

   
   
2. Roger Bourland Says:
   
   April 5th, 2008 at 8:24 am

   Roger Bourland is nr. 27 in the Technorati authority with 58, tied with oboeinsight

   
   
3. Ben Says:
   
   April 5th, 2008 at 9:10 am

   Hi Roger, thanks for the catch, it’s been updated.

   Chris, thanks for your kind words.

   
   
4. Scott Spiegelberg Says:
   
   April 5th, 2008 at 9:32 am

   Cool! For the Bloglines subscriptions, can you alter the program to grab numbers from alternate subscription types (e.g. Atom vs. rss2) and add them together? That’s what Chris did in his original list. I think one good combination would be to add the Google
   Readers and Blogline readers for a total number of readers (at least for those two major rss readers). Have you looked to see if other readers’ numbers can be grabbed, like Kinja? Or also add the number of favorites from Technorati, since those are basically using Technorati as a reader.

   One interesting combination would be to normalize each value and then calculate an average. This would acknowledge that some blogs are more influential by the number of regular readers, and some by the number of links from fellow bloggers.

   
   
5. Anna Says:
   
   April 5th, 2008 at 10:24 am

   Hi Ben,

   Well done for putting in such a lot of work. It sounds like a good way of doing it to me, but I’m not to clued up on all this technical stuff.
   Thanks for including me in the blogs used for calculating the top 50, maybe next year we’ll make the list.
   I’ll have to get Robin to go and do something outrageous just to pull a few more readers in….

   Anna

   
   
6. Lisa Hirsch Says:
   
   April 5th, 2008 at 11:01 am

   Excellent.

   Ben, were you able to run a script on Google for incoming links or did you have to separately search for each blog?

   
   
7. Ben Says:
   
   April 5th, 2008 at 1:22 pm

   Scott,

   Great suggestions! I’ll have a look into extracting both of the bloglines scores. In principal I can add other rankings as well, I just have to work out a way to programmatically retrieve the rankings. Kinja unfortunately looks like it might be a bit awkward. If there are any good sources you can think of let me know.

   I kind of like the idea of coming up with two combined rankings. One would be the “establishment” score (maybe an average of Google incomings, total technorati links) while the other could be a “readership” type score (maybe both RSS feeds and technorati authority) but I wonder if certain ranks should be given more weight in the averages.

   Ben

   
   
8. Ben Says:
   
   April 5th, 2008 at 1:28 pm

   Anna,
   You’re welcome, thanks, and good luck forcing Robin into doing something outrageous :)

   Lisa,
   The script does it automatically. I just feed in a file containing the blog names and URLs, and it conducts a search for each in turn, extracts the score and outputs it to a spreadsheet. I just do a few manual checks afterward to make sure things aren’t going awry, and patch up the ones which didn’t work perfectly for one reason or another.

   
   
9. Jason Heath Says:
   
   April 5th, 2008 at 5:13 pm

   Talk about a comprehensive project! Very cool. I need to check and see how many of them I’m following in Google Reader. It seems to be the only way I scan the blogosphere these days.

   
   
10. oboeinsight » Blog Archive » Kinda Funny Says:
    
    April 5th, 2008 at 7:33 pm

    [...] Drew feels that some are being overlooked (you have to read the comments at ACD’s place). Classical Convert put together his own list because he felt ACD didn’t do right by him and some others. Due to these last lists I’m [...]

    
    
11. Lisa Hirsch Says:
    
    April 5th, 2008 at 10:29 pm

    Ben, could I possibly see your script? I’ve tried to find information on using scripts to query Google off and on over the years without success.

    
    
12. Ben Says:
    
    April 5th, 2008 at 11:26 pm

    Hi Lisa,

    Sure! The collection and processing are broken up into two separate scripts, but I guess the piece you are interested in is the one that actually grabs the data from Google, the relevant section is:

    import urllib2  
    import re
    import string

    
    

    
    def get_google_incomings(blog_address):
     try:
          request="http://www.google.com/search?q=link:%s" % blog_address
          opener = urllib2.build_opener()
          opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')]
          usock = opener.open(request)
          f=usock.read()
          return string.replace(re.search("of\ about\ \<b\>(.*)\<\/b\>\ linking",f).group(1),",","")
       except:
          return "-"

    Which is a function in Python that takes an address as argument, crafts a header to not look like urllib2 is requesting the page (as Google replies with a 403 if the user-agent doesn’t look like a browser for “link:” searches) requests the page and extracts the number using a regular expression. It’s not terribly elegant, but it works!

    
    
13. Top 50 « The Gathering Note Says:
    
    April 6th, 2008 at 11:38 pm

    [...] 7, 2008 by Zach Carstensen The old site, Classical In Seattle, has made the top fifty classical music blogs under a couple of different calculations.  Daily Observations down in Portland also cracked [...]

    
    
14. Lisa Hirsch Says:
    
    April 7th, 2008 at 12:23 am

    Ben, thank you so much.

    
    
15. daily observations » blog rankings 2008 Says:
    
    April 8th, 2008 at 3:31 pm

    [...] stumbled upon a post over at Classical Convert which has published lists of the Top 50 Classical Music Blogs using four different metrics – most [...]

    
    
16. Gabor Says:
    
    April 10th, 2008 at 2:18 pm

    By all four of your measures, Nico Muhly’s blog (nicomuhly.com) would make the top twenty, when not the top ten.

    
    
17. Ben Says:
    
    April 13th, 2008 at 9:48 pm

    Gabor,

    Thanks, I’ll add Nico to the list for the next iteration.

    Ben

    
    
18. Chip Clark Says:
    
    April 16th, 2008 at 7:32 am

    Wow… I’ve been a programmer for years (albeit, not a very good one) – used to work for Netscape when it ruled the WWW up until AOL let us all go…

    …and yet it never ceases to amazing me the lovely little gems (like what Ben posted) for scripting all sorts of ways to more effectively use the internet.

    Not only a nice list, but a new way of compiling my own..

    
    
19. A List of 25 Lists | Soft Tech Reviews Says:
    
    April 28th, 2008 at 12:43 pm

    [...] Top 50 Classical Blogs, Using 4 Different Methods [...]

    
    
20. Classical Music Videos Says:
    
    September 24th, 2008 at 3:56 pm

    Very nice blog! This is very informative. Keep it up!

    
    
21. Bob Hooper Says:
    
    October 6th, 2008 at 9:22 am

    Excellent, I have now added this to my Bookmarks.

    Best

    Bob

    
    
22. Ludwig Says:
    
    February 22nd, 2009 at 2:52 am

    Excellent collection! Thank you for sharing!

    
    
23. Free Classical MP3s Says:
    
    February 22nd, 2009 at 2:54 am

    This is a vital collection of cultural links. The greatest composers may long be dead, but their music sounds on!

    
    
24. Mr. Blue Says:
    
    July 29th, 2009 at 7:44 am

    This is a very convenient and informative list. I’ll definitely revisit some of the blogs listed. Also check out the classical music website http://www.musicride.org.

    
    
25. Matt Mclaughlin Says:
    
    July 30th, 2009 at 10:20 am

    Sounds like lot of effort. Managing lot of data and rankings sure needs lot hard work.

    
    
26. Walt Ribeiro Says:
    
    December 3rd, 2009 at 4:12 pm

    As an orchestral composer, this is an amazing list. There’s tons of great material out there. Great Post!

    
    
27. Can We Have Brahms Without Raisins? | Air & Sea Battle Says:
    
    February 15th, 2010 at 11:17 am

    [...] Here, now, is an entertainment-quotient blog roundup, semi-based on this terrifyingly scientific roundup of classical blogs: [...]

    
    
28. Eric Henderson Classical Guitar Says:
    
    March 2nd, 2010 at 9:20 pm

    Thanks for complilng this list. Im a Classical Guitarist and am always looking for interesting sites. Thanks!

    
    

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