After posting my local blogroll and tagging Chris to show me his (we're all still waiting on Daley to keep this train a-rolling), I've begun thinking about the concept of a blogging A-List, or an elite circle of bloggers who are the "gatekeepers" of the niche. In Boston it's pretty clear who these blogs are.

If you compare the traffic levels of Universal Hub and Bostonist to pretty much any other local blog (even Globe and Herald bloggers), it's pretty obvious who the Boston Blogging Elite are.

But so what you say, there's nothing wrong with popularity. Well, of course there isn't — the danger of an A-list is of course elitism; popularity gives those two blogs an inordinante amount of power over who else in the Boston Blogosphere gets read. UniversalHub has recently pointed to an article that references data that indicates there are over 1,000 local blogs. I would estimate through my own empirical data that there are at least, say, anywhere between 100-300 or so active bloggers writing about Boston-based topics at any given time. A cursory look through the two elite Boston blogs reveals that Universal Hub is far more generous with its linky love. In fact, they seem to maintain roughly similar posting frequencies, but it's rare that Universal Hub posts anything other than a link or two and some sourced blockquote. In reality it would be more fair to call Universal Hub a human-based aggregator, whereas Bostonist mainly links to one of the major papers, or does original reporting or commentary.

Analyzing which local blogs the two overlords link to reveals some interesting (but not so surprising) trends. Running a spider over about 5,000 pages on Bostonist reveals that far and away the blog that they link to most often is Universal Hub, but given its status as little more than an aggregation of other local blogs, why is this the case? The obvious answer is that because, second to Bostonist, Universal Hub is the most highly-trafficked Boston blog. No other local blog is linked to nearly as much as Universal Hub in our sample — it's not even close. It is rare that Bostonist ever links to a blog outside of its own Ist network, and statistically speaking, when it does it's vastly more likely that it will link to Universal Hub than any other blog.

The pattern on Universal Hub is very different, as is to be expected. A fairly un-scientific analysis of the distribution of outbound links from Universal Hub resulted in this graph (click on it to see a larger, more visible version):

There is a clear Pareto Distribution pattern here, that is:

Pareto originally used this distribution to describe the allocation of wealth among individuals since it seemed to show rather well the way that a larger portion of the wealth of any society is owned by a smaller percentage of the people in that society.

A very small percentage of blogs command the biggest percentage of links from Universal Hub. The top of this curve is made up of these blogs:

• carpundit.typepad.com
• bluemassgroup.com
• leftcenterleft.typepad.com
• daleyblog.com
• point08.blogspot.com
• blogs.law.harvard.edu
• bpdnews.com
• 1smootshort.blogspot.com
• hubblog.blogspot.com
• electkevin.blogspot.com
• bluemassgroup.typepad.com
• third_decade.typepad.com

Noticeably missing (other than, of course, yours truly) are a few of the other top Boston blogs, like Bostonist. And given Bostonist's propensity for original content, why is this the case? (We don't give to much weight to the fact that 59% percent of these blogs contain a highly visible link back to Universal Hub.) Do these blogs just post more often? Certainly Bostonist posts more times daily than most of these blogs. Do these blogs create more original content? Again, this is one of Bostonist's fortes. We don't pretend to know the answer to these questions, but we're curious as to what you think.

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