Ritchie has one person to thank...

So Ritchie is at the top of Wikio's 'Economics' blog rankings for a second month.

Unfortunately, like most other things in the world, Mr. Murphy doesn't understand how the Wikio rankings work.

From the Wikio FAQ:

How are the Top Blog rankings compiled?

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.

Only links found in the RSS feed are included. Blogrolls are not taken into account, and the weight of any given link increases according to how recently it was published. We thus hope to provide a classification that is more representative of the current influence levels of the blogs therein.

Moreover, the weight of a link depends on the linking blog’s position in the Wikio ranking. With our algorithm, the weight of a link from a blog that is more highly ranked is greater than that of a link from a blog that is less well ranked.

The rankings are updated on a monthly basis.

To translate; the Wikio ranking of a particular blog is based on two things:

1. The number of links to the blog
2. The Wikio ranking of the blog that links the blog in question

This system is not a measure of how good a blog is, how many readers it has or how popular it is. It is a measure of how much people talk about it. It is a second hand measure, like measuring the ripples in the pond after a stone has been thrown in to understand the stone rather than investigating the stone itself.

So to put this into a real world situation, Tim Worstall writes several posts a week fisking Ritchie. Tim, as second in the Economics ranking, is weighted very highly.

In short, Ritchie has only Tim to thank for being No.1 in the rankings.