HumaneIA

I wrote this article a couple of months ago on Facibus Reviews  - I’ve updated it to reflect the change in technorati authority for the blogs listed.

UX Zeitgeist has the tagline “Important books and topics on user experience design, according to the UX community”. It’s a popularity-driven list of what’s hot in the UX (User eXperience design) and IA (Information Architecture) communities.

While we know that “popular” does not always equal “best”, I know or know of the people that are listed on UX Zeitgeist - they are my peers, my mentors, people I want to like and want to be like. I have reason to trust that in this case, at least, popularity is a fair indication of quality.

UX Zeitgeist displays, among other things, blog mentions. Here is my page on UX Zeitgeist - compare it to Steve Krug’s page. Steve is a nice guy and has written a book that has helped a lot of people - I don’t begrudge him his higher ranking in the UX/IA blogosphere, because apart from being a nice guy, I recommend his book to other
people, and the better he looks, the better I do by reflection for having recommended him. Anyhow, I digress.

This led me to thinking about the IA blogosphere and the technorati-style ranking that I might give for popularity of a set of different IA and IA related blogs. Rather than technorati-style I looked up the Technorati API on ProgrammableWeb.
Sure enough, everything there that is needed was there - but do I have the time to play with this now? The automagical solution is still to come (and if you have any thoughts, please leave a comment - I’ll put it on my project list - a thought
that occurs to me is that a “display the rankings of all blogs listed with Technorati by this tag” plugin might be handy).

OK, so, the manual way. A Technorati search on information architecture yields over 46,000 results. Narrowing it to “information architecture” yields over 4,000 results. Ack. From this result set - blog rankings for those blogs who have posted over the last 24 hours:

• A List Apart is currently ranked 95 (was 97 in April 2007)
• Information Architects Japan is ranked 971 (was 1,903 in April 2007)
• Partial Recall is ranked 347,750 (was 318,212 in April 2007)
• Between Us:Audrey Carr is ranked 755,024 (was 584,159 in April 2007)
• This blog (Facibus Reviews) is ranked 263,030 (was 1,396,735 in April 2007)
• Journalism Architects at USF is ranked 2,193,706 (was 3,083,296 in April 2007)

I know that there are a lot of other IA blogs out there that haven’t shown up in this result set. They include:

• Jakon Nielsen’s Alertbox: ranked 290 (was 463 in April 2007) (while not strictly IA as such, covers a lot of common ground with IA)
• Steve Collins’ acidlabs.org/blog: ranked 22,231 (was 25,352 in April 2007)
• Dan Saffer’s ODannyBlog: ranked 58,114 (was 58,606 in April 2007)
• Donna Maurer’s blog: ranked 95,595 (was 80,218 in April 2007)
• Matt’s Musings: ranked 126,415 (was 398,420 in April 2007)

This is not an exhaustive list by any means - there are a lot more IA blogs out there. If/when I get my API act together, the list might be automagical. In the mean while, you can keep an eye on the top IA blogs according to Technorati by performing an authority search on blogs tagged information-architecture

Aside: There is a potential solution to this issue - using one of the many “turn any website into a web service/feed” options, I could turn the Technorati authority search on blogs tagged information-architecture into a webpage using the same feed to page method used for Blogging in the News.