Ten predictions for the new year
Another blog search engine will release a list of top 100 bloggers. Every blogger on the list will blog the news in the form of: "Wow, I'm honored to have made it onto the top 100 list" with a link back to the list maintainer's blog.
Context & Ripple Effects
Blake Ross's year-end predictions land two days after The Blog Herald crowned its ten most interesting people in the blogosphere for 2005, so the post reads as a wry comment on list season rather than idle forecasting: ranking posts are already multiplying, and he expects a blog search engine to formalize the format with a top 100.
The sharper half of his prediction is behavioral, not editorial — that inclusion itself becomes content. Every listed blogger will announce the honor and link back to the list's maintainer, which is exactly how such lists manufacture their own authority in a link-count-driven ecosystem.
First-order effects
- A blog search engine gains a cheap flagship property: the top 100 list draws inbound links from every blogger it names, each one boosting the maintainer's own visibility and search ranking.
Second-order effects
- Other publishers copy the format — The Blog Herald's year-end list-making shows the template is already spreading — turning December into an annual cycle of ranked lists competing for the same self-promotional linkbacks.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, blogosphere hierarchies calcify around these lists: inclusion drives the inbound links that justify future inclusion, letting list maintainers act as gatekeepers of who counts as influential.
The trend: Blog ranking lists are evolving from editorial roundups into self-reinforcing link economies, where being listed generates the very authority signals that keep you listed.