Wednesday, June 19, 2013

34/100

I received a tweet today informing me that Tech Transformation has made it into the Top 100 Influential Education Blogs list complied by Onalytica.  This was quite a surprise to me - a very pleasant surprise of course when I looked down the list and found my blog there at number 34, alongside blogs by wonderful educational bloggers who I've been following for many years.  It was also a surprise because I do almost nothing to promote my blog, since my last school frowned on anything that might be seen as personal branding or self promotion.  From force of habit, from having to fly under the radar there, I rarely ever tweet about new posts, or add them into Google+ or other social media as this caused no end of problems to me at my last school.  The people who read my blog I guess are a fairly loyal following of international educators who found it and continue to read it and who sometimes comment or tweet about it.  I want to thank you all, as it is your support that has kept me going with the blog during the 3 years when the reaction of those I was working with was much less than positive.  The readership is now more than 365,000 people, though I suppose if I had been actively promoting it, it may well have been much more.

I was curious of course to know how my blog gained this ranking.  Following various links took me to this explanation, which I'm copying here for anyone interested to read:

Our influence measuring methodology is based on the Input/Output model developed by the Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontief. 
The model takes into account all references and citations between the blogs. We developed three metrics for each blog: Influence Index, Popularity and Over-Influence. 
The Onalytica Influence Index is the impact factor of a blog, or how much that blog matters.  
Popularity represents how popular or well-known the blog is among other education blogs.
Over–Influence seeks to capture how influential a blog is compared to how popular it is. 
There is a strong correlation between how popular or well-known a blog is and its influence. However some blogs carry more influence than their popularity leads us to believe; this is what we call over-influence.
It seems that for me, this ranking was caused by the over-influence of the blog.  I think I write for a fairly niche market (international school educators) so I would be surprised to find it was well known or popular.  In any case this tweet made me happy.  It is an honour to be on this list! 

3 comments:

  1. Maggie, it is no surprise that your blog is seen as influential by educators around the world. It continues to influence us here long after you have left. Thank you for continuing to write, despite the problems you faced from our administrators who couldn't recognize the excellence that was right in front of them. You were one of the few people who had total integrity and our school is a poorer place without you.

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  2. Dear Ex-Colleague - I wonder why you don't put your name to your posts. Perhaps you lack the integrity that you claim Maggie had who always stood up for hat she believed in and took the criticism for it - rightly or wrongly. I continue o work at the school and object to your comment that our school is a poorer place without her. A school takes more than one person to make it a great place to be and I feel I and many thers are doing an excellent job.

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  3. Congratulations - the honor is well deserved. Here is Christchurch, New Zealand you have a strong influence throughout the school. Thank you for sharing.

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