Problogger recently came out with a list of 40 Bloggers to Watch in 2011. Being big data geeks, we love lists like this, because they’re easy for us to dig into and find interesting patterns.
Now, we’d have watch these sites’ engagement over time to see how they evolve over the year, but even at first glance there’s some interesting info to be gleaned from the list.
Among the types of blogs, we categorized the highest percentage (37.5%) as personal development — being a better you, living a better life, running a business you love — all that good stuff. The next most prevalent topic covered is entrepreneurship (25%). (Note: these are categorizations I applied after looking over each site and its content.) Some of the other topics are photography, the art of manliness, working through disabilities, and sustainability. Intrigued yet? There’s certainly something for everyone in the list.
This year’s crop of 40 bloggers is quite a different cohort from 2010′s 30 Bloggers to Watch, which were more blogging and business-centric. Those folks also tended to already be more established to begin with (Chris Brogan and Darren Rowse weren’t exactly freshman upstarts even a year ago). So, seeing what the 2011 group gets up to should prove really interesting.
Even better, 38 of this year’s 40 bloggers are also on Twitter, so they’re even more accessible to interact with (though only one blogger didn’t have a visible email address or contact form).
Now, not all these bloggers are at the same point in the evolution of their blogs (or businesses), and, as we’ve already seen, not all of them write on the same topics. So making engagement comparisons isn’t entirely scientific, and they’re not really in competition with each other. In fact, many of them collaborate, guest post, etc., which could prove to help increase audience and engagement even more than just the individual bloggers’ efforts will.
However, for now we can still see who’s getting the most engagement at the moment, based on a recent baseline measurement of engagement. For those new to our analysis, engagement refers to how the audience shows interest in online content on social sites. So when a blog post is published, people read it, and, if it interests them, they might comment, tweet the link, digg it, etc. All of these are engagement activities.
Now, not all engagement activities are created equal. Some represent more interest and effort than others. For example, leaving a thoughtful and interesting comment takes more effort (and indicates greater engagement) than just clicking a button to vote. So we weight each activity and give each a corresponding number of engagement points, which we tally up to give each blog post an engagement score.
Each day we also tally up the blog’s total engagement points, so the points for all engagement activities for all published posts, for a daily engagement score. (The numbers in parentheses in the list below are one day’s total engagement score for each blog.)
For more information in what engagement is and how it works, have a look here and here.)
So, with all that said, the Top 10 among the 40 right now are…
- Nathalie Lussier: Nathalie Lussier Media (1180)
- Brett McKay: The Art of Manliness (620)
- Pat Flynn: Smart Passive Income (604)
- Catherine Caine: Cash and Joy (568)
- Daniel Scocco: Daily Blog Tips (502)
- Tyler Tervooren: Advanced Riskology (319)
- Srinivas Rao: The Skool of Life (230)
- Willie Hewes: Mad Science (230)
- Wil Wheaton: WWdN: In Exile (214)
- Jess Van Den: Epheriell Designs (201)
I definitely think you need to take a look at all of the bloggers, however, since they have such wonderfully divergent voices, approaches, and ways they can potentially connect with you.
And who knows, maybe they can help you become a 2012 Blogger to Watch.



Well, the good news is, we are! Earlier this week we rolled out an update to our 
