UK Waterways Site Ranking surprises

I was quickly toppled off the top of the new Waterways Site chart by Martin Clark's Pennine Waterways. 

That's good; there's something absurd about a blog being No. 1 in such a chart, just as it's silly to consider a single neuron as the most important part of a brain.

Encyclopaedic resources like Pennine Waterways and Jim Shead's Waterways Encyclopaedia deserve to be far busier.  And are.

But what surprised me was how a couple of the forums quickly joined in.  I suppose an active forum is always going to be a lot busier in traffic, and in a sense a forum is an 'aggregation' of blogs, representing the casual effort of a lot of people.

So congratulations to Sam Lashbrooke of Just Canals and Laurie Booth of Boats & Canals for not only joining it, but quickly rising to the top of this new chart.  However, forums and 'encyclopaedias' always are going to be busier than blogs.  And I note that Just Canals is a 'walled garden', in that it could get a thousand hits on the chart from visitors, yet they'd never see a single word inside the forum itself because it's user/password protected.  This rather discounts the purpose of the chart in my view.  

Another surprise is how boating diaries Ten Bob Note and Lazy Days rose without trace, so to speak.

Ernie Williams of Ten Bob Note has been keeping a very good 'boating diary' for several months, but I haven't followed him because he's not technically a blog, and he doesn't have an RSS feed.  (He claims he does, but it's merely a way of telling you when the website is updated, not a true feed.) 

So I don't read it much, which is why I'm taken by surprise when I do.  Cream rises, and Ten Bob Note is clearly cream.  I wish I could do a boating diary like this, but I'm too busy looking for the next joke. 

Lazy Days is another creamy surprise which I never realised was so widely read, and thanks to the UK Waterways chart I'll follow it even more closely in future.

Anyway, the upshot is that Forums are top, Encyclopaedias are next, and blogs are also-rans.   I'm happy to be among the latter, and it's an honour to be with the surprises.

Comments

[Tony Blews]

Sam, its not causing ill feeling.

[Sam]

If the fact we are a forum (which is a memberhiped based system, hence the guests having to log in) is causing ill feeling I will remove the ranking from the website.

I added it in support of the new scheme and pay no bearing to the actual numbers due to the way the system is run - I have my own stat systems and other online ranking systems to tell me how well JC is doing.

[Tony Blews]

After talking with John Barratt of the Boats and Canals forums (Not Laurie Booth), I've taken their listing off. 1255 hits from the same ip address to the same URL within 12 hours smacked of cheating. John denies all knowledge of using the counter and asked me to remove it.

[Andrew Denny]

Maffi: Well, it's just a bit of fun, after all. But some people who stayed out of the other site have signed up for this one, so it has brought one or two surprises.

I think 'folly' is a bit strong a word, though - that takes it too seriously :-)

[Maffi]

Obviously the ranking sites work differently. Even though there are other sites at hitunlimited the uk sites should all be in similar relative positions to each other. As this is not the case it it would be mere folly to place any stead in any of them.