Wikio.com (not to be confused with Wikia.com) is… well… a “Social Networking News” site, to quote the masthead.
They appear to be a blog aggregator of some sort ala Digg or the recently departed DailyRadar sites. Owned by Yahoo at least at some point, Wikio plies the RSS feeds, reports stories, tracks traffic, and allows you to vote on articles. And they make lists.
If I appear to be uncertain of my topic so far, it is because I had not heard of Wikio.com until this week when I got a note from somebody representing them telling me that my site had made their top blogs list for the month and would I like a sneak preview of the list. This preview offered on the condition that I publish the list as a post here.
I have a long establish love of lists, so I agreed.
Of course, one of my first questions was, “How are these rankings compiled?”
And the site has an answer for that. Wikio says:
The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. Our algorithm accords a greater value to links from blogs placed higher up in the ranking.
A blog linking another blog is only counted once a month i.e. if blog A links to blog B 10 times in a given month, it is only counted as having linked to that blog once that month. The weight of any link decreases over time. Also, if a blog always links to the same blog, the weight of these links is decreased.
Only links found in RSS feeds are counted. Blogrolls are not taken into account.
Our rankings are updated on a monthly basis and also include Top Blogs for several categories: Technology, Politics, etc. New categories will be added on a regular basis.
So links in posts drive the list, but links from highly ranked sites add more weight. Simple enough I suppose, at least as long as I don’t have to code it.
Unlike the dearly departed DailyRadar sites, Wikio does not break out video game topics. DailyRadar had MMO Blips for just MMO related sites, and even WoW Blips for just WoW related posts. But for Wikio, the video games list is for any video game related site.
And there are a lot of them out there.
So it seemed rather unlikely to me that this site would make any list that limited itself to a number of entries or say, three digits or less.
I did not, however, count on the power of small sample size and incestuous inter-linking!
Enough rambling… most of you have probably skipped past all this anyway… to the list!
- Kotaku
- Joystiq
- PlayStation.Blog
- Destructoid
- Siliconera
- Game|Life – Wired Blog
- GameSetWatch
- Massively
- WOW Insider
- IndieGames.com – The Weblog
- GamePolitics.com
- Penny-Arcade
- GiantBomb’s Site Mashup
- PlayStation LifeStyle
- The Brainy Gamer
- That VideoGame Blog
- Ian Bogost
- Broken Toys
- Dueling Analogs
- Jay is Games
- Fidgit
- Gamezebo
- Koku Gamer
- PS3 NEWS
- Kloonigames
- Tobold’s MMORPG Blog
- Cinema Blend Games
- Kill Ten Rats
- The Ancient Gaming Noob
- The Koalition
There we go! 30 sites on the list and I made it to 29!
In your face Koalition!
I am not sure what this list actually means.
There are a few of serious gaming sites, like Kotaku, Joystiq, and GameSetWatch.
There are a couple of bigger commercial MMO focused sites, like Massively and WoW Insider. (They changed their name to WoW.com about a year ago, let’s keep up people!)
There is Penny Arcade, a force unto itself.
There are a couple of million+ page views per year blogs, like Tobold and Broken Toys.
And then there is me, down there at 29th place, and I have no idea how I crashed the party.
Wikio.com offers the usual ranking badge for your side bar (you can put your URL in to see where you stand), with a supplemental badge if you rank in one of their sub-categories. For the main badge I am somewhere down around 3,100st place and I do not qualify for the gaming category despite being on the above list. But the FAQ says that they only update the list once a month.
I’ll have to keep an eye on this site to see what all this really means. And maybe soon I will qualify for that video games ranking badge.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 