One of the most controversial aspects of the Healthcare 100 ranking system has been the use of Bloglines subscribers as a proxy measure of total subscribers. We use Bloglines for a simple reason; it discloses subscriber totals for all blogs in its system, and it has an API that allows automated tracking of these totals. Until now, Bloglines has been unique in this regard.
Soon, we may be able to bolster this element of our rankings with data from Google. Google announced recently that it is has made all subscriber data for Google Reader public.
To give you an idea of the data that has become available, the list below shows the top 20 Healthcare 100 blogs – reordered according to their Google subs. The current Healthcare 100 rank is in parentheses.
Keep in mind that, like Bloglines stats, the number of Google subs represents only a fraction of total subscribers — generally somewhere between one-fourth and one-half.
1. PsychCentral World of Psychology, 2,414 (16)
2. Bad Science, 1,526 subscribers (2)
3. Random Acts of Reality, 1,114 subscribers (1)
4. Medgadget, 900 subscribers (3)
5. Kevin, M.D., 849 subscribers (4)
6. The Health Care Blog, 715 subscribers (7)
7. Healthbolt, 613 subscribers (11)
8. Respectful Insolence, 590 subscribers (8)
9. DiabetesMine, 509 subscribers (5)
10. davidrothman.net, 334 subscribers (15)
11. Running a Hospital, 272 subscribers (14)
12. SharpBrains, 260 subscribers (10)
13. Awful Plastic Surgery, 257 subscribers (6)
14. Over my med body!, 208 subscribers (12)
15. NHS Blog Doctor, 207 subscribers (9)
16. Polite Dissent, 202 subscribers (19)
17. Emergiblog, 182 subscribers (13)
18. Pharma Marketing Blog, 157 subscribers (18)
19. Our Bodies Our Blog, 131 subscribers (20)
20. Clinical Cases and Images, 91 subscribers (17)
Caveat: I’m sure the list isn’t perfect, because many blogs have subs from multiple feeds. Where we were able to find multiple feeds for the same blog, we added the subscriber totals together — but if we missed one of your feeds, it wasn’t intentional. Please let us know if we need to adjust your total.
[...] Please keep those concerns in mind when you read at eDrugsearch.com that, if measured by the number of subscribers via Google Reader or iGoogle, davidrothman.net is (just barely) ranked in the top 10 healthcare blogs. [...]
Pharma Marketing Blog has 322 subscribers via FeedBlitz
Understood…to be clear, this number is just for the subs that are from Google Reader. It doesn’t include subs from other sources.