First of all, I think it’s great that you’re openly sharing your concerns and reacting to comments in the blogosphere.

Secondly, I wouldn’t use Alexa for the reasons stated. It’s just not universal enough and is heavily biased. I’d say any metric that requires anything to be installed, such as the Alexa toolbar, will have that problem. If you want to keep it then you could perhaps give it less weighting. I would certainly not give it the same weighting as Technorati for example.

Thirdly, well, to be equally honest, I’d say that you could consider adopting some of the metrics I’ve used in my PowerPR list! Technorati offers three metrics – authority, rank and inboundlinks – which you could use rather than weighting just Authority. Yahoo has inlinks. And you also should be able to secure API access to Google and Google Blog hits. Then you can also look at activity over the past month with Google Blog hits.

In fact, here’s a proposition: use some of the metrics I’ve suggested, and in the Power150 strapline, change it to ‘Todd Andrlik and Brendan Cooper rank the top media and marketing blogs.’

How’s that for a suggestion?

Regards
Brendan

1) Should Alexa even be a metric on the Power 150? If so, what scale would you use to weight it? 1-20? 1-15? 1-10?
2) What other metrics do you recommend for the Power 150 (it must offer an open API)?
3) We know there is no such thing as a perfectly accurate ranking, but is there anything else you suggest to make the Power 150 stronger – keeping in mind that it is fully automated and requires third-party metrics to have open APIs?

Thanks,
Todd

I wish I had a blog at one of the big PR firms. Then I could have IT install the Alexa Toolbar on everyone’s browser, and make my blog everyone’s homepage.

Just another system to get gamed.