But, does anyone else think those figures look suspiciously close, almost as if someone was running a competitive script for the sites to try and ensure one or the other came out top?

From the stats, I posted earlier, I did a very superficial analysis of the finalists, in terms of Google pagerank, subscriber numbers, Compete, and Alexa values, and am concerned that the whole poll was massively gamed by certain parties (whether or not 3rd parties, I don’t know).

For instance, at the time of polling, Sciencebase had almost 3000 RSS subscribers and a Compete rank of 90000th of all websites, and ended up with a little more than 300 votes (thanks to all who did!), similarly Bad Astronomy had almost 10000 subscribers, Compete of 36000th (better but same order of magnitude) and ended up with almost 21000 votes. That’s surprising to say the least. But, not quite as surprising as the fact that Climate Audit has a zero Compete rank and is ranked by Alexa at 250,000th (compared with Sciencebase 130,000th and BA, 50,000th and yet also got more than 20000 votes. In fact BA and CA were within 45 votes of each other. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?

Most of the other finalists were lower in Alexa rank (i.e. general traffic rank) and similarly had low Compete values etc and ended up with the same order of magnitude of votes as Sciencebase. RSS subscriber count is not made available by all finalist blogs unfortunately.

My theory is that most of the finalists received genuine, organic votes and so ended up with a few hundred people voting for them, which is maybe what you’d expect if they all have a few thousand subscribers. Whereas certain other sites may have been receiving votes other than organic votes. It just seems to be too much of a coincidence that they ended up with soooo many votes and almost exactly the same numbers, it’s as if a script were being run by someone, somewhere, most likely entirely independently of either site, to try and push one above the other.

Of course, it could just be that the final tens of thousands of voters who managed to hit the site despite the repeated server outages simply all turned up at once to vote one site against the other…

What do you reckon?

So well done, Dave. I’m sure that you’ll grow your reader base and crush all before you next year!

readers is based on feedburner feed count, an XXX means the site either doesn’t use FB or has not chosen to display their count. PR is Google PageRank, the higher the number the more weight in Google SERPs. Alexa is traffic rank based on their toolbar and widget usage, smaller number is better. Compete is a more accurate representation of how far a blog reaches in terms of traffic. A smaller number is better, but 0 means no compete rank.

http://www.badastronomy.com/ – readers 9766 – PR4 – Alexa 50,291 – compete 36k

http://www.sciencebase.com/ – readers 2826 – PR7 – Alexa 133,114 – compete 90k

http://www.bootstrap-analysis.com/ readers 274 – PR5 – Alexa unranked – compete 412k

http://invasivespecies.blogspot.com/ – readers 102 – PR 5 – Alexa 3,415,798

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/ – readers XXX – PR7 – Alexa 11,797 – compete 7k

http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/ – readers XXX – PR6 – Alexa 3,836 – compete 1k

http://www.junkscience.com/ readers XXX – PR6 – Alexa 153,272 – compete 53k

http://www.climateaudit.org/ readers XXX – PR 6 – Alexa 244,612 – Compete 0

http://invasivespecies.blogspot.com/ readers XXX – PR5 – Alexa 3,415,798 – compete 0

http://pipeline.corante.com/ readers XXX – PR 4 – Alexa 56,205 – compete 26k

http://journeybystarlight.blogspot.com/ readers XXX – PR4 – Alexa 3,768,415 – compete 0

Sites are ordered by readers, then PR, then Alexa.

Here’s that voting link again…

http://2007.weblogawards.org/polls/best-science-blog-1.php