The Top 25 Environmental Blogs

As I’ve indicated before, content ranking and analytics service Postrank is a sponsor of Social Media Explorer. One of the benefits of that sponsorship is one post per month about them. But I’ve asked the folks at Postrank to give me a little lee-way with the post so that I can ensure that it adds value to you, rather than just serves as an advertisement for their services. It’s a bit of an experiment with online advertising — making it more engaging — and they were cool with the idea, so here’s a sponsored post I hope doesn’t seem quite as much of one.

Long before Postrank was a sponsor of SME, I asked them to do me a favor and help me rank the top education blogs. That post continues to be one of the most visited at Social Media Explorer because it serves a valuable purpose for people looking for blogs in that category. In order to both provide an additional service by ranking blogs in a category of interest and show off the evolving technology that runs Postrank, I asked the gang there to help me produce a ranking of the Top Environmental Blogs.

I pulled together an OPML file (which is a collection of RSS feeds) of each of the blogs listed in Postrank’s community curated lists of Environmental Blogs, Green Blogs and Sustainability Blogs and sent that master list to Postrank for analysis. I asked Jim Murphy, Postrank’s stat guru, to expand the filters from Postrank’s main tool, however, so we could give folks a nice resource to play with. Postrank’s consumer tool displays engagement scores based on the last week’s worth of information. I asked him to give us a bigger picture of these blogs and score the engagement over six months. The following are the Top 25 Environmental Blogs based on June through November 2009 engagement.

Before you get up in arms that your favorite environmental blog may not be here, keep in mind this list was procured from Postrank’s publicly curated lists. It may not be all-inclusive. Jim also ran some extended numbers on the top five on this list. I found this chart interesting. It shows how AutoblogGreen shot up in engagement with an active fall. Comparisons like these are useful for public relations and marketing professionals performing blogger outreach because it shows who’s hot now and who’s consistently engaging over time. This is why Postrank is a valuable service.

Murphy did say that the information he provided me was really a look at what the technology can do, not what Postrank provides … yet. While new features are continually being worked on, the consumer tool for Postrank does give you a more real-time analysis rather than historical per view as we have here. Postrank’s Analytics tool for your blog (technically the service that sponsors SME) does a really nice job of giving you deep analysis of both what your blog does over time and how each post on your blog performs along various engagement parameters.

The reason I accepted Postrank’s Analytics tool as the first true sponsor of Social Media Explorer is because they are a service I think the majority of my readers would find useful. If you are a blogger outreach person (PR, marketing, social media), Postrank helps you determine which blogs matter most and right now. If you are a blogger, Postrank helps you analyze what pushes your audience’s buttons to help you get better. It can also help you quantify your blog’s success to monetize it more effectively.

And I also knew they’d be hip and help us produce some lists that folks would find useful. Enjoy the list of Top 25 Environmental Blogs. And if you work with green bloggers or are one, let us know how we did in the comments.

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