Greetings, pop pickers!

Wikio's blog chart is updated today. I submitted this blog for ranking way back at the start of 2011 and the process seemed to take ages. Its ranking first appeared in May, showing it at number 136 in the topic of Religion and Belief (you have to define the topic area of your blog when submitting it, from a list drawn up by Wikio). I thought that position pretty respectable.

Once you've been ranked, Wikio provides you with a widget that you can add to your blog, which updates automatically each time the rankings are recalculated. Submission for ranking is, of course, completely voluntary. A great many bloggers haven't submitted their sites to Wikio for this purpose. But I like to think that the most serious, committed ones have (or maybe it's the most self-conscious, insecure and egotistical!)

When the June rankings were published, the blog had slipped one place, from 136 to 137. A wee bit disappointing, sure - but I could live with that.

Early this evening, this month's rankings were published. It's jumped from number 137 in the chart to number 86: a massive leap of 51 places! I am well chuffed.

If you're wondering how the positions are calculated, here's some detail, lifted from the Wikio site:

How are these rankings compiled?

The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. These links are dynamic, which means that they are backlinks or links found within articles.

Only links found in the RSS feed are included. Blogrolls are not taken into account, and the weight of any given link increases according to how recently it was published. We thus hope to provide a classification that is more representative of the current influence levels of the blogs therein.

Only links found in RSS feeds are counted. Blogrolls are not taken into account.

In December 2010, retweets were added as an additional factor to the ranking algorithm. For each twitter account, only one backlink per blog is taken into account each month.

Our rankings are updated on a monthly basis and also include Top Blogs for several categories: Technology, Politics, etc. New categories will be added on a regular basis.

Got that? No, me neither. Still, number 86, eh? Phwoah!

Once a blog gets into the top 100 in its subject category, Wikio features it in an online list. I hope that will give a further boost to our position. Want to see who/what is 81-100?