While bopping around the internet after my morning workout, I made a trip to the one, definitive site on the internet for the Minnesota Twins, that being our good friends over at Twinkie Town. One of their postings today talks not about the team, but about the site itself, and more specifically where it ranks with the blog service Technorati.
Technorati is a service that indexes millions. . .literally. . .of blogs across the internet. I can't find the most recent number of sites they have listed, but the number in June of 2008 was north of 112,000,000, so it's a lot. They also break these down into categories, such as sports and politics and business and so forth. So, after looking at how the folks at Twinkie Town fared with their site, naturally I was curious as to where The Daily Norseman would sit in their rankings.
Needless to say, I was pretty happy. Don't get me wrong. . .I don't necessarily need a bunch of numbers to tell me that this is the best site on the internet at what it does. I already know that's the case. But, occasionally, it is nice to have some independent confirmation of the facts.
First, when it comes to blogs that are focused solely on football, the first eight spots are occupied by ESPN blogs. So, we're not going to count those. The ninth one is Bleacher Report. . .we're not going to count them, either (and if you've ever read Bleacher Report, you know why). So, starting with the tenth spot and stretching all the way to the twentieth position, there are 12 blogs. . .two of them tied for 20th. Eleven of those 12 spots belong to sites that are part of SB Nation, including our humble little site here at number 20 (tied with the good folks from our Cincinnati Bengals site, Cincy Jungle). So, out of the nearly 2,100 football blogs that Technorati catalogs, our little community here finds itself in the top 1% of all the sites, which is pretty sweet.
Following that, I decided to expand my search to all of the sports blogs cataloged by Technorati as well, of which there are 10,620, according to their numbers. To my surprise. . .and delight. . .sitting there in the 48th spot is The Daily Norseman. So while this site resides in the top 1% of all the football blogs on the internet according to the definitive source for such things, it's in the top one-half of 1% of all the sports sites on the internet overall. (So is Twinkie Town, incidentally, which is on there in the 55th spot).
(It does sort of make all that garbage we heard earlier this year about how the site was "slipping" or "getting worse" seem. . .what's the word I'm looking for here? Oh, yes. . ."stupid". . .it makes it seem rather stupid. Moving on.)
Much like Jesse said in his post over at Twinkie Town on this matter, the site's ranking is certainly not all about yours truly, or even the rest of the main writing staff. It's about the kind of community that this has become over the course of nearly five years. Whether it's the Game Threads that regularly run into the thousands of comments. . .seriously, when you're getting complaints about the servers slowing down, you're doing some serious business. . .or the FanPosts or the FanShots or even just the comments, it's everybody that contributes to this site on a daily basis that make it not just a Minnesota Vikings community, but the Minnesota Vikings community on the internet.
Now all we have to do is stay where we are. . .and, with a community like this one, I'm guessing that's not going to be a problem at all.
So, if you happen to be reading this, congratulations to you for making this community what it is today. As we approach our fifth anniversary and our five millionth hit, we're just going to keep on doing what we've been doing. . .and that's being the best.