Sounds & Fury

S&F Top 50 Notice

As Google's Backward Links counts seem to have stabilized for December 2008, we began compiling our S&F Top 50 Fourth Quarter 2008 rankings. After we'd logged the Backward Links counts for about 1/4 of our list of some 145 classical music blogs, we received this notice from Google on our attempt to retrieve the Backward Links count for the next blog on our list:

We're sorry...

... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

If you're continually receiving this error, you may be able to resolve the problem by deleting your Google cookie and revisiting Google.

Needless to say, our system is virus- and spyware-free, and we of course deleted every Google cookie on our machine, but to no avail. Google continues to refuse to honor our search requests for Backward Links counts (we're apparently in violation of a Google TOS which prohibits "Using any software that sends queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage ranks on Google for various queries"). Consequently, it seems the S&F Top 50 is now out of business permanently unless we can find an appropriate and qualified alternative data source to use as the basis for our S&F Top 50 rankings.

We don't hold out much hope for that.

It's been fun.

S&F Top 50 Notice (Administrative Note)

We're holding off posting the S&F Top 50 Fourth Quarter 2008 rankings as Google's Backward Links counts haven't yet stabilized for December. The counts for our test sample of 30 classical music blogs have changed three times over the last 15 days, some with wild swings, and therefore are not trustworthy for our purpose. Whether this signals a change in Google's past protocol of recalculating Backward Links once a month (typically, on the 20th to the 27th of the month) to a more frequent recalculation cannot be determined at this time. If the protocol has changed in that way, it will make Google's Backward Links counts which are the basis of the quarterly S&F Top 50 rankings useless for our purpose, and the S&F Top 50 rankings will have to be discontinued unless a useful alternative can be found.

Stay tuned.

S&F Top 50 Notice Update (Administrative Note)

[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.

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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.

S&F Top 50 Notice (Administrative Note)

For reasons known only to Google, the propagation of its monthly (roughly) Backward Links updated index throughout Google's thousands of servers which typically takes something on the order of a few days to a week after it begins, still hasn't propagated completely and become stable for this past month (i.e., end of the 3rd quarter). Consequently, we've deleted our prior posting of the S&F Top 50 for the 3rd quarter of 2008 as just about every single number has changed, and the numbers are still changing. When this Google Backward Links update has finally propagated completely and stabilized, we'll then recompile our S&F Top 50 rankings for the 3rd Quarter of 2008, and re-post it. We apologize for any problems the now deleted prior posting may have caused.

S&F Top 50 Progress Report — The "Google Dance" Has Begun

Good news. What search engine specialists still call the "Google Dance" has just commenced. That's to say, Google has begun it's periodic re-indexing of its entire database of Web pages wherein a recomputing of that all-important number called PageRank is made for each and every Web page in the index (for instance, this time around, S&F's PageRank has increased from 5 to 6 — a HUGE increase as PR5 is a high-population middle ground; a sort of demarcation zone separating the important from the unimportant), and then the Backward Links count for each and every page is recalculated using those newly computed PageRanks. The Dance typically takes some few days to complete, after which time we'll then finally be able to compile our Second Quarter 2008 S&F Top 50 rankings.

Stay tuned.

Waiting For Google (Administrative Note)

We're at present blocked from preparing our Sounds & Fury Top 50 Classical Music Blogs 2nd quarter 2008 ranking as Google has not updated their Backward Links data since the first week of May (reflecting April's numbers), and consequently the existing data are way stale. According to the best guess of the best publicly accessible sources (and it can be no more than a best guess as Google is so secretive no one outside Google really knows), Google supposedly updates that data every 30 days or so. But a fair random sample of our newly expanded list of classical music blogs (148 at last count) shows that the numbers haven't moved since the first week of May (again, reflecting April's numbers).

And so we wait.

Pick And Choose

In a fit of mild pique over our refusal to use the URL of his website instead of the URL of his blog in our compiling of the S&F Top 50 classical music blog rankings, Ben of Classical Convert has retaliated by compiling his own four ranked lists of the Top 50 classical music blogs, each ranked list compiled using the same list of blogs (which list of blogs is NOT the same as the S&F Top 50), but each utilizing a different statistical data set to determine the rankings. The four data sets used are:

1: Google Backward Links (the same data set used for the S&F Top 50)
2: Technorati Authority rating
3: Google Reader (RSS aggregator) subscriptions
4: Bloglines (RSS aggregator) subscriptions

Kinda cool, actually, as long as one keeps in mind that two quite different and not-comparable things are being measured by these four data sets. Within the universe of classical music blogs, RSS aggregator subscriptions (Google Reader and Bloglines) are a measure of relative popularity while Google's Backward Links and Technorati's Authority rating are measures of relative importance. Without making comment here concerning the statistical soundness of any of these four methodologies for the purpose intended (concerning which we've commented in some detail and at some length on Google's Backward Links count and on Technorati's Authority rating in our S&F Top 50 Eligibility and Methodology), it's your choice as to which measure is most meaningful to you, and thanks are due Ben for giving us the choice irrespective of his reason for doing so.

Issues Raised Concerning The S&F Top 50

A couple issues have been raised on two blogs concerning the S&F Top 50, and so we thought we'd note them here and give our answers to keep them in one place.

Lisa Hirsch of Iron Tongue Of Midnight thinks that the number of incoming links is not the proper criterion to use to rank the importance of a blog, and suggests that the number of blog hits is the way to go. Ms. Hirsch has a point of sorts. Problem is, there's no practical way to accomplish a ranking of blogs by number of blog hits. The decisive difficulty in such a procedure is that the one compiling the rankings would need access to a recognized and reliable objective statistics provider's tally of blog hits for each blog examined, and that statistics provider would have to be the same for the entire universe of examined blogs (different providers calculate counts differently and they rarely match), a requirement clearly not met in the universe of classical music blogs some of which, we suspect, have no statistics provider at all. There are other difficulties with this method of ranking as well, but they're moot as the decisive difficulty is, well, decisive.

Scott Spiegelberg of Musical Perceptions wants to know why we exclude institutional and group blogs from the S&F Top 50 rankings. The answer is institutional blogs are excluded because such blogs are subject to institutional oversight and subtle institutional pressures and are therefore instantly suspect as regards content and the completely free personal expression and philosophic viewpoint of the individual writing the blog no matter that the individual swears on the life of his children that no institutional restraints or pressures exist for him. Group blogs are excluded because they do not represent the personal expression and philosophic viewpoint of a single individual which in our view is what blogs are — and ought to be — all about. In the case of blogs written by the same duo of writers, we view that case as if the duo were a perfectly matched married couple. Their opinions may at times differ, but it's been our experience of such duo-written blogs that the underlying philosophy of life and art of both writers is essentially a unity and their blog is therefore treated by us for this purpose (but for this purpose only) as one written by a single individual.

That's it so far. As other issues concerning the S&F Top 50 are raised (if such in fact are) we'll add them and our answers as updates to this post.

An Announcement Of Interest To Some

We received an eMail the other day that, among other matters, informed us that the sender had found Sounds & Fury by seeing its name on a ranked listing of classical music blogs. This piece of intelligence provoked an interesting correspondence between the sender and us as to the value of such ranked lists, our good self taking the position that such lists are largely nonsense as, if nothing else, the Technorati database on which the rankings are based is ill-constructed and subject to all sorts of statistical distortions which, all things considered, was fairly surly and curmudgeonly of us to point out as Sounds & Fury has consistently placed in either the Top 10 or Top 20 of such ranked lists, the only blog written by a “civilian” (i.e., not a professional musician, MSM journalist or critic, or academic) to do so.

My correspondent, however, had some good points to make in favor of such ranked lists the, for us, decisive one being that such lists are often the only reliable guide a newbie or “outsider” has available to him to sort out the wheat from the chaff initially without his having to slog though dozens upon dozens of blogs himself, most of which turn out to be ultimately valueless reading.

This set us to thinking as to whether there actually existed a reliable and well-constructed statistical database on which to base such rankings. After a careful search, we found one even though it was not intended to serve the purpose of creating a ranked listing of blogs: Google’s “Backward Links” (Google’s name for a site’s incoming links) function. Unlike the incoming links count that determines Technorati’s so-called “Authority” number for a blog which link count is entirely indiscriminate as to source, the list of incoming links to a blog that Google produces is in fact a “filtered” list that takes into consideration the worth and importance of the sources of those incoming links, and therefore omitted from that list are all incoming links the sources of which fall below a minimum threshold level of PageRank, Google’s intricately computed rating of a webpage’s importance within the entire universe of webpages. What was of significance to us for our purpose was that the number of incoming links qualifying for that list is expressed by Google as a single number right at the top of the list’s pages, and that single number is in fact a statistically “clean” expression of both the quantity and quality of the incoming links to whatever blog is under examination, and a perfect number to use in constructing a statistically distortionless (relatively speaking) ranked list of classical music blogs.

Consequently, subsequent to the end of this year’s first quarter (31 March), Sounds & Fury will publish its first installment of a new quarterly updated ranked listing of classical music blogs, the Sounds & Fury Top 50 Classical Music Blogs, on 2 April (we forbore to publish it on 1 April for reasons obvious).

Look for it then.