The Last of the Rankings (?)

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I added code to detect inactive blogs and that clears up my todo list for the Desi Blog Rankings project. (Previous posts here and here.) It was a small, fun project which helped me pick up a few things. Did you know that in Python, even methods and functions can have attributes!

>>> def foo():
...   """This is the doc string"""
...   print "In foo"
...   print foo.bar
...
>>> foo.__doc__
'This is the doc string'
>>> foo.bar
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
AttributeError: 'function' object has no attribute 'bar'
>>> foo.bar = "foo.bar is swell"
>>> foo()
In foo
foo.bar is swell
>>>

Going back to the rankings, Dina Mehta has a great post on the difficulty of devising metrics for the blogosphere. Incidentally, I discovered Dina’s blog through these rankings. Now isn’t that what this is all about? As I wrote in first post on the rankings and in subsequent comments, these technorati rankings are not about finding the most popular blogger. Rather, they are the means to discover bloggers, new to you, who are popular amongst folks and so must be writing good and interesting posts. Do the technorati rankings achieve this goal? What do you think?

I think the rankings suck. I have an idea floating in my mind on how this could be done in a simple and effective (?!) way. But before I write about it here, I am going to read Link Love Lost that Dina links to.

PS: If you think Technorati Rankings are a swell idea, feel free to mail me more blog urls for inclusion in the next update.

☙