Threescore and five
26 July 2008
65 is not normally considered a notable number, but we can celebrate it here in this post. At least here in Europe, 65 is the traditional age for retirement. Even more important is that 65 is the atomic number of terbium, a metal used in making solid-state Flash drives.
In 1965, the film Mary Poppins romped home at the Academy Awards winning five Oscars.
Normally reserved for kings, Winston Churchill's state funeral in 1965 was the largest that Britain has ever seen before or since; meanwhile in America, a different king, Martin Luther King, lead the pivotal Selma to Montgomery marches, and Mariner 4 took the first ever photos of Mars.
Most influential technology sites in the UK
These historical facts were a very tenuous build up to the rather more insignificant fact that Wikio, a blog search engine that has been bought by Yahoo, has ranked this site as the 65th in their list of top 100 most influential technology sites in the UK.
I clicked on the link How are these rankings compiled? Which gave the following information:
The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. These links are dynamic, which means that they are backlinks or links found within articles.
Blogrolls are not taken into account and Wikio only counts links from the last 120 days. We thus hope to provide a classification more representative of trends in the blogosphere.
So from this it probably means they are sucking in everyone's RSS feeds and then parsing them for links; well that is how I would create such a site. Scraping a whole site, i.e. like Technorati does, would make it very hard to distinguish what is a 'blogroll' and what is a post.
Who is the king of the Midlands?
Now technology is a broad topic, and the UK is a wide area. If we zoom into to sites about free/open source and sites based in the UK's Midlands; then it seems this site is the 2nd most influential open source site in the Midlands, behind an acquaintance of mine, and fellow Midlands resident, Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu community manager.
So the question is readers, can we climb the 21 places to become the most influential open-source site in the Midlands? Can Birmingham triumph against the Black Country?
Only time will tell, but if you are in a position to link here and help pimp this site up the table, please do. Also, if you have linked to me and I have not linked back, either in a post or in my recommended links section then it means I do not know about your site, so leave a comment telling us about it!
1 Åke Forslund says...
Congratulations,
I'll link to you some time in the future to help with the statistics!
Also, keep in mind that 65 is the smallest number that becomes square if its reverse is either added to or subtracted from it =)
Posted at 8:49 p.m. on July 26, 2008
2 Gerald Thurman says...
Isaac Hayes died today (10 August 2008) at the age of threescore and five (one-half-score days shy of threescore and six).
Posted at 1:25 a.m. on August 11, 2008