Up and Coming Blogs

The Self Made Minds site recently featured the Top 100 blogs based on feed subscriber count as revealed by Feedburner. Gratifyingly, my Sciencebase.com site is in the list. Quite a bit past halfway down, but in the Top 100 nevertheless.

Post author Al Carlton says, “One statistic that I’m particularly interested in is the number of subscribers different sites have in different niches…I thought it would be both interesting and fun to create a top 100 (or so) of the sites with the highest feeds, so spent Saturday morning doing a big trawl around.”

I thought, isn’t it about time the smaller sites got a little bit of this kind of glory, so I have pulled together a kind of “Bottom Ten” of up and coming blogs, ones that are not showing huge subscriber numbers but are interesting nevertheless and could one day reach those heady heights flaunted by the blogs listed in Carlton’s post.

So, here they are, to have qualified for my trawl the blogs had to have less than than 100 subscribers when I visited, or be showing relatively low traffic levels as to be unlikely to have substantial subscriber numbers.

I hope no one is offended at being included in this Bottom Ten list, please tell me if you are, or if you know you have more subscribers than I have alluded to.

First up is Wayne Smallman’s Blah Blah Technology News, this web designer and PHP guru is working hard to differentiate his site from the myriad other computing tech sites out there and truly succeeding. He seems to have tried link baiting in the past, which is not a problem, but more recent posts provide nothing but rock solid information, and that is much more likely to pull in the punters and get his feed subscriber numbers up than anything else.

Second, is Andrew Sun’s blog On the Road. Andrew is based in China and is an occasional commentator on posts at Sciencebase.com. He’s a graduate student in materials science and has recently moved his blog to the blogging network of the international science journal Nature, which is probably the best move he could have made. When I last looked at his legacy blog site he had just one subscriber, but those numbers are seriously on the rise now that he is in the Nature club.

Next online is Tony Williams’ ChemSpider chemical database blog. I’m working with Tony on a new chemistry blog for ChemSpider called Spinneret, but in his blog he discusses the trials and tribulations of starting up a chemical database service for the millions of molecules out there. At the time of writing there were 11million+ compounds in the database.

Business writer Matthew Stibbe runs a couple of websites, one for his main business and the other, the Bad Language Blog, where he vents steam about the issues of the day, such as the horrendous use of language. Why, he asks are the home and end keys on your computer keyboard named as such, why not top and bottom, and why, when he dialed a wrong number did the operator tell him the number was “inappropriate”? Surely, it was just wrong! Presumably an inappropriate number would be one that resembled an expletive when viewed upside down on a pocket calculator! Anyway, Matthew has a sharp and witty tongue, so his is definitely a site to check out. I have to admit I don’t know how many subscribers he has, so apologies, if he is over the 100 mark.

Another sciencey blog, this time from Hsien-Hsien Lei, who keeps an eye on DNA and asks how our knowledge and ability to exploit this double helical molecule going to improve our lives.

Here’s a blog with probably a rather small niche audience, although that said, they are fast approaching the target subscriber figure set out above - Building the Ergonomic Guitar. Now, I have a few guitars already, but nothing like this, and I certainly agree that the ergonomics of conventional guitars leave a whole lot to be desired. The odd thing about this blog, which I suppose also makes it quite intriguing, is that embedded between posts on ergonomic guitars there are the occasional post about the nature of copyright infringement and the art of blogging itself.

Tim Eade is another web designer on the market, and yes those are his feet on the beach. His site ITS GUI showcases the sites he has designed as well as offering readers his eclectic picks from the world of IT Services: Cool Widgets, iGoogle info, single-use email address advice, and more.

This blog is not so much a blog as a source of some great leads for freelance writers. There is no one quite so dedicated to the freelance cause as Deborah Ng, who runs Freelance Writing Jobs. Almost on a daily basis, with few breaks, she manages to share with her readers dozens of leads and this, of course, is in between working on her own freelance writing career.

Michael Kenward is a fellow science journalist, one who also has a shared name with a science Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, oddly enough. Mike’s blog brings his biting commentary on a wide range of issues in the form of genetically modified words and other musings in the domain where science and business collide.

Last, but not least, the blog of Phil Bradley (no relation) covers all kinds of topics that should be close to every blogger’s heart - search engines, social bookmarking, and a lots more besides. Phil is a former librarian but now describes himself as an internet consultant, and good luck to him. He provides a wealth of information here covering neat sites, such as Trailfire and Meebo to the latest developments on Google.