[toplists]

This post contains a list of the top 20 disability blogs by traffic ranking. Before we do the full list, I’m first, like a good scientist, take you though the motive and the method used…

I follow a range of blogs in the disability space, some that post things I aggree with, some that post things I don’t argree with, some for news, some for opinion, and some for political slants on the same issues.

I was interested to know if I was following the same set of sources as everyone else, so I pulled together a list of blogs that are, roughtly speaking, within that space. I collected candidates from three sources: the list of disability links on the (excellent) http://samedifference1.com/, the article “50-best-learning-disability-blogs” at Zen College Life, and this list at snagglebox.

This gave me a list of 187 blogs (once I removed dublicates), and I wrote a quick script that took the blog url and fetched the traffic rank from Alexa. Alexa isn’t perfect, but it has a reasonable amount of data, so it’s not bad at saying things like ‘there are over 35,000 websites, in the UK alone, that are more popular than MENCAP’ (I found this pretty astonishing and I think it would be increasing to do proper mapping, to see if the charity sector really isn’t taking it’s fair share of internet traffic.

This gave me a sorted list of the 187 blogs (you can actually see the full list, as an excel file, here).

The problem with that list is that it includes a bunch of things that aren’t *really* primarily disability focused…

So if we just look at the top five of that list we can see some problems…

babiesonline.com 186,921 lovethatmax.com 215,911 parentingsquad.com 224,682 wrightslaw.com 306,637 noahsdad.com 337,290

Babiesonline is a general family site that has a tag for learning disabilities. The most recent LD post was in 2009, so I’m suspecting that the majority of traffic isn’t disability related… On the other hand – lovethatmax.com is absolutely a very moving disability blog (I recommend this recent post). parentingsquad.com is a general purpose parenting site with an ADHD tag whereas wrightslaw.com is a specialist disability site, and noahsdad.com is a parents blog.

I’ve (by hand and personal opinion) weeded out those sites for which I felt that the majority of their content and traffic was not disability related to give you the following list… Also – as this is a list of *blogs* I’ve removed things like ‘companies that get a lot of web traffic anyway, but also happen to have a blog’… (I was 50-50 about mencap because it does a lot of news, but dropped it to highligh ‘bloggers’ rather than organisations).

THE TOP 20 DISABILITY BLOGS BY TRAFFIC RANKING!

Name Alexa Rank 1 lovethatmax.com 215,911 2 wrightslaw.com 306,637 3 noahsdad.com 337,290 4 mostlytruestuff.com 416,951 5 limpingchicken.com 497,424 6 leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk 563,144 7 differentdream.com 603,547 8 donaldandlisasorensonfamily.blogspot.com 912,135 9 stimeyland.com 1,143,369 10 adderworld.com 1,178,189 11 shift.ms 1,188,078 12 adiaryofamom.wordpress.com 1,199,623 13 samedifference1.com 1,201,916 14 specialmompreneurs.com 1,417,509 15 extremeparenthood.com 1,444,554 16 lizditz.typepad.com 1,874,263 17 schuylersmonsterblog.com 1,932,665 18 adventuresinautism.blogspot.com 1,959,116 19 gotdownsyndrome.blogspot.com 2,514,910 20 douglascootey.com 2,658,358

Do let me know if there are any obvious ones I’ve missed, this is very much a first draft process that I hope to update… It’s been a really useful exercise for me and I’ve been finding lots and lots of great content :0) One of the interesting things for me was how parent-dominated the list is, relatively few from users, and only one sibling… hmm… (for those who are interested, and I expect nobody is, this site you are currently on would be about 40th in the list… but I suspect that’s largely because I’ve simply not found a lot of blogs…)

EDIT…

Lovely response from people, really nice to see – one of the things that should be stressed is that this is a global ranking, so if we look at a blog that has readership mostly concentrated in one country (Sue Marsh for example, who I very much approve of, has a blog that does require a certain amount of familiarity with UK politics) then it’s going to be read less than the more ‘universal’ blogs like noahsdad.com (we should bear in mind, that same difference also wanders into UK politics semi-regularly, so it’s a fairly naunced thing with lots of factors).

What I’ll do, given that I’m a UK person and so are most of the people I interact with, is that when I update this list (I’ll need to, because there are a few people sending me lists of blogs I should have included) I’ll add a UK-blog list.

There are a few interesting things and open questions that have turned up in this that have caught themselves up in my brain. So you may be getting posts on such things as: the dominance of parent, rather than user or sibling, blogs; the ‘differential’ between social media influence and blog readership; the politicalisation of disability blogging in the UK rather than USA; and many others….

2nd EDIT…

Actually it turns out that the Alexa information isn’t regular enough to do a top 20 UK blogs (or even top 20 blogs read in the UK), so this will have to stay as a global list for now.