Mack Collier from The Viral Garden – and I think his blog has never been so well named – launched December 12th the idea of the “Z-List”. Now for those of you not familiar (yet) with it, here is a little recap.
Mack originally proposed to bring more “link-love” to great blogs that, for whatever reason, aren't getting their due, link-wise. His idea was to create an open list, built like an internet meme, that bloggers could copy and paste on their blogs. Now, the goal of this was also to influence Technorati’s system of using a blog's number of links to determine its “authority”. And this gave birth to the Z-List growing on the blogosphere right now.
Well, mindblob was lucky to be chosen for the Z-List by Gavin Heaton, just 2 days after Mack Collier’s original post (December 14th). Although I wasn’t really into rankings at all before this happened, I must confess, I’m quite impressed by the evolution of this thing. I checked my Technorati ranking to document it later and here are my observations.
At the time, my ranking was somewhere close to: 128.871 with 14 blogs linking to mindblob (yep, I know... a real z-lister!). Today (only 12 days later), mindblob is ranked : 50.946 with 94 links to here and it is growing everyday.
Thumbs up to Mack Collier (yes, I had to say it!), because his idea is brillant, plus he really launched a viral interference to the Technorati ranking system. It is indeed viral in a way... because once launched, nobody can stop it.
Can anyone tell me where I can find the latest and most updated Z-List? ; )
Ok now, a few thoughts I'd like to share with you...
First thought :
Technorati ranking is based on links from blogs to blogs. The more links to a blog, the higher position this blog gets to. Although a great reference site, we all know this ranking system is just one way to rank blogs, the Z-List wave could make it a bit more relative than it was before. I wonder if Technorati is going to consider this as relevant and maybe comment.
Second thought :
Thumbs up to Mack Collier (yes yes... again!), because all the blogs linking to the Z-List, link to his blog as well. But honestly, I like this idea, because he definitely deserves it. Can’t wait to see the next Top 25 marketing blogs list on the Viral Garden.
Third thought :
Guess what... Seth Godin’s in the run. He just launched a Squidoo page to add his touch to the Z-List phenomenon. On his “lens” you can vote for “blogs you might want to check out, but haven’t heard of”. Quite a good idea also and probably an ingenious marketing move. And by the way... yes, there’s a link to mindblob from Seth Godin’s site. ; )
Nevertheless, Mack Collier noticed Seth’s list and quoted on his last post :
“...it's obvious that he started with the 'Z-List' of blogs that's getting passed around so much, as the basis for the list. It also appears that Seth, or someone else, have added several of the so-called 'A-List' blogs, such as his, Creating Passionate Users, and Gaping Void. I'm not a big fan of that, since I think it dilutes the purpose of the 'Z-List', and as you can see, the so-called 'A-Listers' have mostly moved to the top already.”
To be honest with you, I just don’t know how to read and understand these votes. At the time being, there are 277 blogs in his list. Only 9 blogs out of 277 get positive points, 4 have 0 points, and more surprising : 264 get negative points ! ! ! OK, votes seem to be moving fast, up and down, really. So, I guess we’ll have to wait for a while. Still, there are more negative votes than positive votes. Does that mean that the original list is not relevant? My question is : who is voting on Seth’s Squidoo and on what criteria?
Mack to end his post in a very elegant and clever way :
“But hey, that's the beauty of the community, they can take an idea and run with it wherever they want. The end result is that most of you should see even more traffic and links to your blogs, and find some more good reads, so that's a good thing, and I thank Seth for doing this.”
Last thought :
(oh... I mean, of this post, don’t worry there will be more!) This wave is on the move and indeed, not much can stop it now. But wherever it goes, maybe we should keep in mind the original idea of the Z-List, allow me to say :
“The spirit of the Z-List” : a focus on blogs of interest.
So, there are two alternatives, really. Either speculate on rankings (oh... did I just do that on previous paragraphs?) or spend time discovering the Z-List blogs. And I encourage you to do so... it is rich, full of stunning blogs, reads and posts, and definitely worth spending time on. As a conclusion and loop, I’ll quote Gavin Heaton (thank you mate! I vote for you too) and his blog Servant of Chaos, who captured, imho, the spirit of the Z-List :
“...have been so excited at what I have found.
It just goes to show that more is MORE.”
What's your perspective on the Z-List?
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