Top 100 Blogs for Development Managers (Q3 2008)

Note: The newest edition of this list is available here!

Finally, it’s here! The new list I’ve been working on for more than two weeks! This is the top 100 most popular blogs for software development managers. You might already have seen my earlier list: the Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever. Well, I’m afraid this new list was even harder to make. Please refer to the bottom of the list for my list of complaints, and why my life sucks. But first, let’s have look at the results…

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About the Nominations
Only blogs that were nominated are present on this top 100 list. In two earlier posts (here and here) I asked my readers to cast their votes. This resulted in 220 nominated blogs, which included a number of my own favorites. I only considered blogs that have been active in the last three months. (I see no point in wasting time on blogs that aren’t even being kept up-to-date with new content.) Some nominations were discarded because I don’t think they were real blogs. However, some popular personal sites were mentioned often enough to allow for a few exceptions. For example, Alistair Cockburn and Paul Graham have sites that don’t follow the “standard” blog pattern. But I think some people would have flamed me terribly had I disqualified such celebrities.

The idea of this list is to promote popular blogs that are interesting to software development managers. Therefore, I ignored the blogs that did not have any (recent) content directly related to either requirements, design, coding, testing, management, process improvement or methodologies. I also discarded generic project management blogs without topics on software development practices. Likewise, I discarded the pure coding and technology blogs when they did not elevate to the level of “managing” or “ruminating about” software development. Last of all, I only considered blogs in the English language. (I had not mentioned this constraint before. But fortunately, blogs in other languages had not been submitted.)

About Statistics
The nominated blogs have been rated using five different statistics. I will describe them here:

• Google Page Rank (PR): The page rank for each blog indicates a blog’s relative importance on the Internet (by analysis of the weight of other sites linking to it). The higher the page rank, the better. You can see that only blogs with a page rank of 4 or higher have made it on the final Top 100 list.
• Technorati Authority (TA): The authority for a blog indicates the number of other unique blogs that are linking to it. It is a simple way of determining if a blog is considered an authority within the blogosphere.
• Alexa Rank (AR): The Alexa rank is the best available (free) measure of global traffic statistics. By comparing these rankings (where lower means better) we know which blogs have attracted more visitors.
• Hits: The number of Google hits was used to get an indication of the number of links on the Internet.
• Comments (Cmts): For each blog I’ve counted the number of comments on the last 10 blog posts. This should be an indication of the level of interaction that each blog generates with its readers.

No Feeds
I wasted a lot of time trying to find a measure of the number of RSS/Atom feeds for each blog. Unfortunately, this proved too much of a challenge. Only few blogs run their feeds through FeedBurner with a public feed count. And the number of subscribers in Google Reader appeared to be a very unreliable statistic, as it seemed to depend on the specific feed type (Atom/RSS/etc) that was selected. If anyone has a better suggestion for evaluating feed counts, please let me know! I am eager to use feed counts, not in the least because my own blog (with 900+ subscribers) seems to be doing nicely in that respect.

About Ratings
For each of the five statistics I calculated the relative scores for the good and bad performers in that specific area. Unfortunately, in some cases, the statistics were not available. Some blogs are not registered with Technorati. (Hello, Mike Cohn, Scott Ambler, and others, wake up please!) Also, when blogs are part of bigger sites, Alexa doesn’t track the traffic statistics for the individual blogs, only for the entire site. Which makes the rankings pretty useless in those cases. (Artima WebLogs en CodeBetter.com are two examples of sites that host multiple blogs, but that don’t support individual statistics for any of them. In these cases I simply listed the aggregated blogs as one entry on the list.) Finally, there are a number of authors that simply don’t allow comments on their blogs. In each of these cases I let the blogs score “neutral” in those areas. They were not punished for lack of statistics. It turned out that each blog earned at least three scores, out of the five statistics. So I simply calculated the average of the scores that were available.

Let it be known that I don’t care if people think my system sucks. In fact, I would agree wholeheartedly. But it’s the best I could come up with at this time. And I believe the result is actually quite nice.

Message for Other Authors
I fully understand that your site should also have been on this list. Well, tough luck. I’m quite sure that I’m going to repeat this exercise again in a number of months. So next time, if you want to be on this list, do the following:

1. Make sure it’s a real blog, and not a Wiki, or a business card, or an error page.
2. Nominate your blog, either by adding a comment to this post, or by sending me an email.
3. Make sure that your last blog post is not dated March 11, 2006.
4. Except for stuff about your code, your bike, and your mom, make sure there’s something interesting to read for software development managers.
5. Increase your rankings with Google, Alexa and Technorati. It helps. And discuss your posts with your readers.
6. It might also help if I really like your blog.

My Confession
I was quite relieved to see that my own blog has acquired enough visibility to make it to #65 on my own list. The smart people among you will understand that this top 100 list is just an elaborate plot a) to get referrals to this blog post from at least 100 popular blogs; b) to increase my own feed count; and c) to increase my own ranking in the next edition of this list.

There, I admitted it. We all have our weaknesses. But I’m sure you are all just as understanding and forgiving as I am. Now let’s start reading what those other 99 great blogs have to say about software development.

Do you seek more advice for Software Developers, Team Leaders & Development Managers? 

Get the book!

Management 3.0

Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders

Wait! Don't stop reading now. I have some more interesting lists for you:

• Top 100 Agile Books (Edition 2013)
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• Top 100 Software Engineering Books, Ever
• Top 50 New Software Development Books
• Social Media Blogs Top 200
• Top 150 Management & Leadership Blogs
• 100 Interview Questions for Software Developers
• Top 200 Blogs for Developers (Q3 2009)

My new book Managing for Happiness is available from June 2016.