Intellectual Property Law

Fighting Words: The 50 Most Powerful Blogs

By Cynthia Brumfield

In what no doubt will break out into a blogopshere debate, the Guardian has published this list of the world's fifty most powerful blogs. Number One is the Huffington Post, and probably deservedly so. Number Two is Boing Boing, again deservedly so given its incredibly longevity and influence.

Number Three, however, is Mike Arrington's TechCrunch, an understandable although controversial choice. TechCrunch definitely draws the readers and is doing some smart things, such as creating real resources in CrunchBase. But however loud, splashy and successful TechCrunch is, "power" is not the same thing as "hot."

Some of the posts at TechCrunch are slavishly optimistic about the bubble-spawned start-ups covered (and some accuse venture investor Arrington of unclean hands in this regard) or they're simply wrong-headed and aren't written with the expertise typical of two other blogs mentioned in the TechCrunch write-up but not named as one of the fifty: GigaOm and Paidcontent.org (the latter of which probably has a better chance than TechCrunch of surviving as a viable business in the long run.)

From number three on down, it's really a question of perspective and values, with a lot of kitschy or hobbyist, as opposed to political or social, sites in the mix (Icanhascheezburger is number eight?). What's great to see is a smattering of non-English language blogs in the list, such as Beppe Grillo, written by a popular Italian comedian and political commentator or China's Xu Jinglei.

I can't judge the value of these blogs, but the vast majority of the world is not English speaking and the inclusion of blogs written in other languages at least gives a passing nod to this fact.

As an aside, just to reinforce the power of Twitter, I came across this ranking because I follow Hugh MacLeod on the microblogging service. His blog, Gaping Void, came in at number thirty-one on the ranking.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on March 09, 2008 (boomark / email).