I forgot / didn’t have the time to mention it at the time, but a couple of weeks back Scottish Roundup turned one year old.

But it wasn’t the only one — Tartan Hero, Scots and Independent, North to Leith and Granite City were all celebrating last week — mere days after I was bemoaning the lack of SNP blogs. That’ll teach me!

Is it a coincidence that so many great blogs started just after I began Scottish Roundup? Of course not! Unfortunately for me ego, it seems as though an SNP press officer was more influential than me. Pah!

A few weeks ago Grant Thoms drew up a list of the best Scottish political blogs out there. Inevitably, eyebrows were raised.

On the back of that, Holyrood Watcher said:

As far as I can determine, his league table was not based on objective criteria (but it was none the worse for that). I have been musing on how to introduce an element of rationality into the assessment.

Holyrood Watcher’s approach was to use Bloglines subscriptions to try and figure out which blogs were the most read. It’s quite a common method, although not without its faults — as I pointed out in my comment at Holyrood Chronicles.

Another popular method of ranking blogs is to look at Technorati Authority. Unfortunately, Technorati is more unreliable than the Red Bull Formula 1 car. Some of the stats it generates are clearly wrong. I have come across blogs that have an authority of 0, but still have dozens of ‘reactions’.

In case you’re not au fait with Technorati’s terminology, here is how it works. Authority measures how many different blogs have linked to your blog over the past 180 days. Reactions count the number of links in total that go to your blog.

I have actually gone and done it. I thought it would make a quick and easy post, but I spent hours trawling through Technorati to work out how the Scottish blogs line up. I have not even begun to form a comprehensive list. I have looked at around 60 or 70 different blogs. Of course, most of them are the ones that I am most familiar with. They are not all about politics, but they are all Scottish.

But whenever I thought I was finished, I caught sight of an obvious one that I had missed out. So no doubt I have still missed out quite a lot. If you think I’ve missed something out, leave a comment.

There are all sorts of reasons why you should take this with a pinch of salt. For one thing, there are the technical issues that I have already alluded to. Technorati is perennially broken. I could not get any information whatsoever on three major blogs — Mr Eugenides, A Place to Stand and Blether with Brian. (I think it is safe to assume that under normal circumstances at least two of these blogs would be right at the top.) I am certain that there are several other errors. I simply cannot believe some of these results.

Also, the recent link-fest in the wake of the Alisher Usmanov affair has inflated a lot of people’s authority. I reckon mine went up by 50 or 60! This extra authority will disappear almost completely once 180 days have passed.

Also, it is worth remembering that this method only measures links, and is no reflection of how many people are reading the blog. But there are a number of interesting things that come out from this. Think about the ratio of reactions to authority score. If the ratio is quite high, that means that the blog generates a high amount of conversation on a small number of blogs. This suggests to me that these are really good blogs that, for whatever reason, haven’t got the wider attention they deserve.

As with Holyrood Watcher, I am not a big fan of lists like this. As he says, blogging is not a competition. But I was intrigued to see the lie of the land, as far as Technorati is concerned at least. It is a bit of fun. But it’s nothing more than that — a bit of fun.

The first number is authority. The number in brackets is the number of reactions.

1. Adelaide Green Porridge Cafe — 253 (671)
2. doctorvee — 157 (534)
3. Freedom and Whisky — 147 (452)
4. Musings of a Reactionary Snob — 141 (483)
5. rhetorically speaking.. — 131 (309)
6. A Big Stick and a Small Carrot — 127 (699)
7. Scots and Independent — 126 (306)*
8. Mike Power’s Website - Not A Blog — 115 (1,199)
9. Clairwil — 114 (331)
10. 1820 — 114 (302)
11. J Arthur MacNumpty — 108 (302)
12. Bill’s Comment Page — 105 (201)
13. The Select Society — 100 (266)
14. Amused Cynicism — 90 (138)
15. Love and Garbage — 89 (171)
16. Tartan Hero - 83 (289)
17. Scottish Blogs — 81 (245)
18. Shuggy’s Blog — 79 (391)
19. Backword — 77 (211)
20. Informationally Overloaded — 71 (286)
21. Silversprite — 71 (146)
22. Michael Greenwell — 59 (124)
23. Rolled-up Trousers — 58 (861)
24. Colcam.Image — 53 (137)
25. Havering On — 50 (217)
26. Scottish Roundup — 50 (139)
27. Bloodbus — 47 (127)
28. The Scottish Patient — 43 (129)
29. Councillor Terry Kelly — 40 (476)
30. Islay Blog — 39 (91)
31. Right for Scotland — 36 (257)
32. Ridiculous Politics — 34 (116)
33. Naked Blog — 32 (251)
34. North to Leith — 25 (96)
35. Scottish Tory Boy — 25 (40)
36. Terry Watch — 24 (92)
37. SNP Tactical Voting — 24 (90)
38. Granite City — 23 (76)
39. North East Scotland Nationalists — 23 (50)
40. Indygal — 22 (48)
41. Edinburgh Sucks! — 20 (49)
42. Ian Hamilton QC — 19 (42)
43. leyton.org — 17 (81)
44. Surreptitious Evil — 16 (62)
45. Kezia Dugdale’s Soap Box — 16 (50)
46. Councillor Andrew Burns’ Really Bad Blog — 15 (63)
47. Whoopdedoo — 14 (66)
48. Scottish Futures — 14 (36)
49. Adam Smith Was A Socialist — 14 (24)
50. Holyrood Chronicles — 13 (132)

• Scottish Political News - 36 (74) - listed separately because it is a blog aggregator

Data gathered on Sunday 14^th October evening.

*Scots and Independent recently changed URL. I calculated its ranking by aggregating the scores of the two URLs.

As I said, there are a lot of surprises in there. And it is radically different to the top 20 that Holyrood Watcher posted last week. It goes to show that there is no relationship between the number of readers and the number of links. And neither of these are a measure of importance anyway. No-one in their right mind would objectively rank Holyrood Chronicles as low as 50^th.

At least Holyrood Chronicles is the ninth most-read. As they say, there’s only one thing worse than not being talked about, and that’s being talked about (I got that the right way round, right?).

Something else interesting about this list? As far as I am aware, there are no Lib Dem members on it (although there are a number of Lib Dem voters there I reckon). The highest, that I can make out, is Anything Caron can do… in 55^th. Actually, Caron herself would be higher, but still misses out (just) on the top 50. Should really have checked that before I published this post.

To Google Reader, that is.

I’ve been a user of Bloglines pretty much ever since I started heavily using RSS feeds. Which is probably getting on for a couple of years. I was pretty happy with it. Sure, sometimes it is a bit slow to update feeds, and it is down more often than I would like. But all-in-all Bloglines is pretty impressive. There were just one or two things missing.

Google Reader used to be pretty much universally regarded as a duff product. When I first tried it when it initially launched it was chronically slow, ugly and generally clunky. I stayed well clear. But last week it was given a major spring clean so I thought I would try using it as an experiment over the weekend. I haven’t visited Bloglines since.

While the old Google Reader stank of a company beginning to rest on its laurels, it now looks as though they are proactively grabbing RSS by the scruff of the neck and making it seem interesting to normal people who don’t know their RSS from their elbow (sorry to whoever I stole that joke from; sorry for even telling it).

Describing it as “Your inbox for the web”? Why did nobody think of that before?! And as everybody else has noted, the email connection doesn’t end there. Google Reader’s new look is more than a nod towards the Gmail interface. A great improvement.

And there are a whole lot of nifty features that I have fallen in love with. Okay, that ‘next’ browser button is a bit of a gimmick. It’s not good if you’ve got about 200 blogs to read. You don’t know what’s coming next. Some blogs take bloody ages to load (this is one of the plus points of RSS). And if you wanted to do something like star or share it a post (more on those later) after reading it via the ‘next’ button it would be a right pain.

The next button is quite fun. You don’t know what you’re gonna get. It’s like a lucky bag. Which can be fun, I guess. It’s good if you’ve emptied your ‘inbox’ (as we now seem to be calling it) and you just want a quick way to see what’s been written in the past few minutes. It does seem to be a little bit quirky — sometimes it takes you straight to the actual post, other times it takes you to the blog’s front page. It’s not a major problem though.

The OPML import worked smoothly, and all of my RSS feeds appeared in the same folders (or is that labels? tags? More on that again in a bit) as in Bloglines. And one of the first things I noticed was that when I clicked on a folder the entries appeared in (reverse) chronological order, just like blogs. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for Bloglines to do.

In Bloglines if I click on my ‘Blogs’ folder, each blog is listed alphabetically with (as far as I could tell) no way to change it. If you want to be up to date it’s a poor system. The most recent stories are buried in among everything else. What a pain! Google Reader has recognised this. Top marks.

If I were to suggest an improvement, it would be an option for posts to appear in (non-reverse) chronological order. Maybe, perhaps if you wanted to see how a story developed, you would prefer to read the oldest posts first. At the moment I am scrolling all the way down, and by the end I could be reading stuff that is over a day old which feels a bit pointless.

Another cool feature, although not too impressive or unique, is automatic refreshing. It’s useful, but Bloglines also implemented this feature very recently.

In Bloglines, if you open a huge folder, everything in that folder is automatically marked as read, even if you haven’t come close to seeing it. If I was interrupted then I would have to manually mark each post as unread, which took a bloody age. Google Reader has an amazingly smart, yet simple, solution. Posts are only marked as read as you scroll past them. So I can safely click away from any open folder safe in the knowledge that everything that I haven’t read will still be there.

Another nifty interface feature is the option to change how you view your feeds. You can select ‘list’ view, where entries appear exactly as emails appear in Gmail. Then there is ‘expanded’ view which follows the familiar Bloglines-style approach. Although I would always prefer expanded view for reading blogs, list view is fantastic if you just want to skim headlines.

One thing that frustrates me about the feature, though, is that (as far as I can tell) there is no way to view one folder in list view and another in expanded view. I would like to read the Digg feed in list view because there are a lot entries that I don’t want to read, but I would prefer everything else to be shown in expanded view. It would be good if there was a way for me to set it up this way so that I didn’t have to keep on switching between the views.

Another feature borrowed from Gmail is the ability to ’star’ items. If I find an entry particularly useful for whatever reason, clicking the star icon will leave it easily accessible in the ’starred’ section. Once again, this was a bit of a pain in Bloglines. If I didn’t want to save it to del.icio.us I just had to make it as unread. Google Reader’s ’starring’ system is much tidier. This is proving useful for roundup purposes.

A feature that shares equal billing with ’starring’ is the ability to ’share’ items. I’m not really sure what the point of this is supposed to be. It seems like it’s trying to do something similar to del.icio.us, but it’s much more basic and a bit rubbish really. As an example, I’ve decided to ’share’ my last blog post on my shared items page. As you can see, it’s not up to much. It just reminds me of those blogs where all of the posts have been plagiarised. I’m not really sure what the point of this feature is.

Now on to my complaints! You can expect things to be a bit hairy because it’s still a Google Labs product, but there are still a lot of improvements to be made. Firstly, there still seem to be a few loading quirks / bugs / issues. Sometimes I find myself staring at the Google Labs fizzing conical flask for an eternity. Often the ‘updated subscriptions’ panel doesn’t update so it says that I have unread items even though I’ve read them.

Tags / labels / folders also need improvement. For a start, they seem to have three different names for the same thing now. That’s unless I haven’t understood some kind of subtle difference between tags and folders. I also can’t find an easy way to create a new folder. The only way seems to be to tag a post and then go to ‘manage subscriptions’ to put things into the relevant folder. What a pain.

Why can’t you just create a folder in the ‘manage subscriptions’ section or even when you’re reading a feed? There is a dropdown menu for each feed that only contains one option: unsubcribe. Why not put it there?

All-in-all, though, Google Reader is now fantastic. The only thing I really miss from Bloglines is the Firefox plugin, although I’m sure a Google Reader one will appear soon enough. There are still a few rough patches, but I’m happy enough with it for me to be using it all the time now. Good work, Google.

Update: Another great thing I’ve just remembered about Google Reader is that images from posts made on Blogger are actually appearing, which they never did in Bloglines. That’s probably just Google being crafty, but I like it.

I’ve been a big user of Bloglines ever since I started properly using RSS feeds. I’ve not wanted to use Google Reader before — it was clunky, fugly, slow and just really shit.

But Google Reader has been given more than a spring clean this week, and it feels a whole lot smarter. But Bloglines also had a subtle update which made it feel a lot smarter. I was going to stay with Bloglines, but then I found this page via Digg.

It’s alerted me to one smart new feature of Google Reader — no, I’m not talking about the easter egg. I’m talking about that ‘Next’ button. You drag it on to your toolbar and click it to take you to the website of your next unread feed.

Hopefully this can eliminate some of the problems with reading everything in an RSS reader. The tendency to skip posts, or the fact that sometimes images are missing from RSS feeds and — most importantly of all — that sadistic ‘unread’ count are all gone.

The only thing is, with the next button, will using Google Reader become a game to reach The End of the Internet?

I’ve decided that I no longer have enough time to read as many blogs as I did. Although having said that, although I felt snowed under during the week, I’ve found myself with way more spare time at the weekend than I expected.

Anyway, my Bloglines account had almost 300 subscriptions in it. I’ve followed the advice that all those lame “don’t waste as much time blogging” articles contain, and I’ve trimmed it down to under 200 now. I’m only sticking with blogs that I really like to read. I’ve also made some changes to the blogroll. I usually give borderline blogs the benefit of the doubt, but I’ve been pretty ruthless this time.

Another reason why I’ve taken a lot of blogs out of my Bloglines list is because I’ve realised that I’m no longer really reading blogs. When you’ve got a counter that actually tells you how many posts you haven’t read, the whole thing becomes like a game to get that number down to zero. Well, that’s how the world of Duncan works anyway.

I’m not sure how much time this is going to save me though. A lot of the feeds that I took out hadn’t been updated for a long time, sometimes up to a year!

Anyway, I’m hoping to explore the blogosphere a bit more in the way I did before I discovered RSS readers.

Since some time yesterday every Blogger / blogspot.com hosted blog has been displayed with a red exclamation mark next to it in Bloglines. Which is bad news.

I’ve heard a lot of Blogger users moaning recently. But the feeds themselves seem to still exist so I’m kind of confused. Is Google / Blogger blocking Bloglines or something? What’s going on? I’d like to be able to use Bloglines to, you know, read blogs.