Having said that, I can personally say that I find the behavior of - as Ben calls it - "one rogue website, operated by an editor of the Virginian Pilot at night" - to be deplorable. When a blog formally requests that they be removed from someone's aggregator, blogroll, or whatever, they should do so out of common courtesy, if nothing else. If a blogger came to me and asked to be removed from RK's blogroll, I would honor that request.
Sadly, in the case of this particular site, even though RK is normally ranked very high - #1 this week - I STRONGLY object to the entire methodology of this blatantly, overtly partisan Republican site (note that ad yesterday from Ann Coulter, and today from Rudy Giuliani, plus the ). Obviously, this is simply an attempt by a "a conservative and a former speech writer for the Bush Administration" to give a boost to conservative blogs over non-partisan and progressive blogs, but under the false pretense of being "unbiased," using a "mathematical formula" (as if that's supposed to give it extra weight), etc. The unsurprising result: a pathetic joke in which blogs with almost no traffic rank higher than popular and excellent blogs like Vivian Paige (#13) or Waldo Jaquith (#15) or Bearing Drift (#20). Utterly absurd. What's even worse, Ben and I have asked numerous times to be removed from this piece of trash, even though both of our blogs consistently rank at or near the top. Ben has even gone to the effort of speaking to the Editor of the Editorial Page at the Virginian Pilot, but to no avail.
In sum, this "ranking" system is flawed, biased and unethical, and I want no part of it. That's why RK is currently looking into other options, such as specifically cutting off BNN's IP address, in order to block them from receiving our content. I hope to hear more about this soon, and if it's possible, to take action as promptly as possible.
While I'm sure we can create custom blocks on RSS feeds, this is also kind of interesting in that it shows how much blogs are now influencing public discourse...to the point it's basically a threat to MSM.
I think the greater issue is that someone is making money off of other people's contents. BNN is ad driven and provides no real unique content other than some data on what the blogs it covers are talking about, and even then that's limited to some wordpress blogs and never counted RK and NLS's comment sections.So he's taking other people's creations and profiting while doing everything possible within the site's design to limit actual traffic going to the sites that provide for his cat ontent and not allowing folks to opt out.
Personally, my issue is with someone profiting on the work of others without their consent.
A lot of blog aggregator websites have failed. Why should BNN be any different?
The ones that have staying power add some value. Typically they have some sort of approach to headline or highlight "important" or "breaking news" entries.
I don't see how BNN can do that by rating stuff according to the traffic of its own readers. For all but the busiest blogs (like this one) a large percentage of the traffic is probably from authors of the blogs on the BNN blogroll who are going there often to see how they are ranked.
I guess a good model for a Virginia political blog aggregator would be something like Memeorandum
http://memeorandum.c...
Is there a Virginia equivalent of that?
As the blogosphere becomes more and more relevant, having such information at your finger tips will be very useful if it's worked out correctly. I get the feeling that the whole thing is still finding its place and certain bugs are being worked out, but it really does generate some interesting numbers (aside from the rankings).