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"After the official launch on Monday of yet another service which measures popularity of blogs - Spotplex - it's time to revisit this space, long ruled by Technorati. Are the new contenders strong enough, and what's the ultimate way of measuring your blog's popularity and success?\n(For an extensive list of tools to measure pageviews and visitor metrics for all websites, see our recent article Analytics Toolbox: 50+ Ways to Track Website Traffic).\nSpotplex\nWe're starting with the newcomer, which may be first in this list, but it has a long road ahead. Spotplex has a strikingly simple, yet effective way of measuring popularity of blogs - it tracks actual visits via a script which blog owners have to install on their blogs to be included in the list. One would say that this is the most accurate way to track blog's popularity, but Spotplex's own results don't yet indicate that - partly because many big blogs simply didn't add the Spotplex script yet. The problem with Spotplex's approach is that it continues one of the persisting issues of the blogosphere - the big get bigger, while the small have an increasingly harder time to catch up.\nSphere\n\nSphere is a blog-search engine with a very cautious - almost secretive - approach. Its secret weapon is the contextual widget which appears in blog posts and brings you related posts from other blogs, but they have been very slow with giving it to the public, and many requests for participation, especially by smaller bloggers, have not yet been granted.\nAs a tool for measuring a blog's success, Sphere doesn't go far, although it's a logical road to take for a blog search engine - in fact, they even recently removed their lists of top sites on certain subjects and are now focusing only on bringing you content, making it hard to discern who's who as far as rankings go. Still, they have the tools and a good backing, and anyone who can manage getting their blog posts to appear in Sphere's widget often will find themselves in a respectable company (and will probably get some traffic out of it, too).\nFeedburner\n\nOne of Google's recent acquisitions, feed management company Feedburner does not want (or at least did not want in the past) to be a metric of success, often citing that some of their clients do not want to disclose their subscription numbers. However, the little orange chicklet showing the number of RSS subscribers has become a very common guest on blogs of all kinds, and to many it is the best metric of a blog's success. RSS subscribers mean a tech-savvy, devoted audience which are in it for the content.\nThis also demonstrates the downsides of having Feedburner subscriptions as a blog success metric - if your blog's visitors aren't tech-savvy, you can have zillions of readers and not that many subscribers (celebrity blogs, for instance, are much bigger than tech blogs). Furthermore, many big sites don't have the chicklet, although they use Feedburner, which skews any serious attempts at a real top list. Still, if your subscriber count is decent, you might want to show it off with the chicklet, as it's a great eye-catching way of showing that your blog has some serious credibility.\nAlexa\n\nOften the subject of criticism for its quite inaccurate results, Alexa is still an alright way to measure a blog's popularity, for one simple reason - it works for everyone. Unlike many other metrics which detect only bigger sites, Alexa has risen to fame by seemingly being able to detect very small sites, even on a per-country basis.\nAgain, the accuracy of Alexa's weird jumps and falls is often questionable, and many blogs will get an unjustly low score, for example blogs about Macs (Alexa doesn't offer its toolbar for Mac users) and non-tech blogs (tech-savvy readers are supposedly more avid to install Alexa's toolbar, although in my opinion the real tech-savvy readers will refuse to install software that doesn't do much for them). In any case, its availability to everyone and the fact that its results are still widely cited and used makes it worth your while to check out your Alexa rank. Alexa is, however, recently getting some serious competition from the likes of Quantcast and Compete.  None of these services have yet proven a high degree of accuracy, and internal stats are still more trustworthy.\nCompete\n\nA direct competitor to Alexa, Compete is gaining ground simply for the fact that Alexa's results can sometimes be inaccurate, and people are switching over. This said, Compete's results - from our experience - aren't much better than Alexa's, especially for smaller sites. But, putting Alexa, BlogPulse and Compete results side by side can reveal much more than just relying on one of these services. Downloading the Compete toolbar gives you access to several more tools, like Trust Scores and Site Profiles.\nTechnorati\n\nWe've left the king for last because, well, it's still the king. It's not that its top list is without flaws - problems with indexing and sometimes less than stellar customer support somewhat undermine the credibility of their famous top 1000. But, it's still a very clear-cut and simple way to measure the popularity of a blog - you see the number of inbound links (which is converted to the slightly vague \"authority\") and you see the blog's standing.\nSince the reach and popularity of Technorati is so big not many bloggers choose to avoid it, which means that basically everyone who's anyone ends up there in the end. Is there a way for Technorati to improve their ranking system and their top list? Yes. Could some of the competition top them if they tried? Probably yes. But, so far, no one has seriously taken on Technorati's blog ranking system."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2007/06/26/6-key-ways-to-measure-your-blogs-success/>