The Nature Blog Network—Popularity vs Quality

Billed as The Toplist for Every Species of Nature Blog, the Nature Blog Network (NBN) sees itself as “a resource for the very best nature blogs on the net—based on actual page views.” Simply counting page views is a great way to indicate the popularity of a blog, but popularity does not necessarily correlate with quality.

My fear is that people who use the NBN will tend to focus only on the top blogs (i.e., those that appear at or near the top of the list), thereby missing blogs that may rival the top blogs in quality, but which for various reasons have not achieved the popularity of the “toplist” blogs.

I pride myself in maintaining an extensive list of bird blogs on my blogroll. I currently feature some 313 active blogs (221 North American, 70 European, 13 Asian, 5 Australian, 3 African, and 2 South American). Of the 60 bird blogs listed on the NBN today, nearly half of them (29) are not now included on my blogroll (in most cases, because I was unaware of their existence).

My conclusion is that the NBN is a great resource for locating and accessing bird blogs, but if you just focus on those at the top of the list you’ll be missing out on some high-quality writing and photography. In reality, the NBN will never replace the Google blog search in utility (i.e., ability to readily access blog posts on topics of interest). And finally, your bird blog won’t appear in the NBN at all unless you take the time (just a few seconds, really) to join. So get busy!