[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:56 AM Eastern on 15 Oct. See below.]
Since our 5 October notice concerning the pulling of our priorly published 3rd quarter 2008 S&F Top 50 rankings, we've been checking Google's Backward Links counts for a selection of some 30 classical music blogs, and they keep changing almost from day to day, some by small swings, some by large (for instance, the count for Sounds & Fury has come up variously as 2380, 2830, 1910, and at last check is showing 2820; and Night After Night, which for more than a week appeared to be in what is called the "Google Sandbox" with both its PageRank and Backward Links stripped, at last check has had its PageRank restored, and is showing 2690 for its Backward Links count).
We at first thought the reason for this was simply that Google's (roughly) monthly Backward Links update had not yet propagated completely throughout Google's thousands of servers and so had not stabilized. But this almost daily change in count suggests something else and something more fundamental is going on, and we can't suss out, nor can we find authoritative information on, just what that something else might be. Until (and unless) we are able to find such authoritative information to make a determination as to whether it positively or negatively impacts the use of Google's Backward Links count as the basis of our S&F Top 50 rankings, we are suspending publication of our quarterly Sounds & Fury Top 50 Classical Music Blogs rankings indefinitely or until such time as we're able to find a useful replacement which, at this writing, seems nonexistent (Technorati's so-called "Authority" number is a bit of a joke, and thoroughly useless for this purpose).
To those who found the S&F Top 50 a useful resource, our apologies.
Update (2:56 AM Eastern on 15 Oct): Google's Backward Links counts have finally stabilized. Accordingly, our 3rd quarter 2008 S&F Top 50 rankings can now be published.
Acting In Opera
Hillary
