The following includes the top 50 blogs which are powered by Blogger, including their scores and tagline to explain what each site is about.

You can find a full explanation of the scoring system and download the Excel file containing all of the sites ranked beneath this list.

#1 Post-Secret

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

#2 Official Google Blog

Insights from Googlers into products, technology and the Google culture.

#3 Blogger Templates

Widgets, hacks and original themes for Blogger.

#4 The Sartorialist

Selected as one of Time Magazines Top 100 Design Influencers

#5 America Blog

A great nation deserves the truth...

#6 Google Operating System

Unofficial news and tips about Google.

#7 Hullabaloo

Political writings by the outspoken Digby.

#8 Dark Roasted Blend

This site is one of the favorite destinations on the web for all things weird and wonderful, updated daily.

#9 Blogger Buzz

The official blog for Blogger news, updates and Blogger culture.

#10 Decor8

Fresh finds for hip spaces.

#11 Pink is The New Blog

"Fingers firmly on the pulse..." Celebrity gossip and photos from Trent Vanegas.

#12 Google Webmaster Central

Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google Index.

#13 Indexed

This site is a little project that makes fun of some things and sense of others. Use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.

#14 BLDGBLOG

Architectural conjecture, urban speculation and landscape futures.

#15 Twitter Blog

The official Twitter blog, featuring news, updates and general Twitter culture.

#16 The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

"Dude, I invented the friggin iPhone. Have you heard of it?"

#17 Greg Mankiw's Blog

Random Observations for Students of Economics

#18 Calculated Risk

Finance and Economics

#19 Official Google Adsense Blog

A look inside Google Adsense.

#20 Gorilla Vs. Bear

Simply one of the best music blogs I've ever seen!

#21 Strobist

"Learn how to light..." Learning how to use off-camera flash with your dSLR to take your photos to the next level.

#22 Shakesville

"Shakesville is a feminist blog, and a feminist's blog. It is a progressive blog. It is a safe space. It is a community."

#23 Althouse

Ann Althouse: a law professor who "sometimes writes about the law".

#24 Xiaxue

"Everyone's reading it!"

#25 Dumb Little Man

Tips that will save you money, increase your productivity, or simply keep you sane.

#26 Eschaton

One of the most frequented political blogs in the world.

#27 Face Hunter

"A man out and about in london and beyond: eye candy for the style hungry."

#28 The Official Gmail Blog

News, tips and tricks from Google's Gmail team and friends.

# 29 The Belmont Club

"History and history in the making".

#30 Fogonazos

"Asombros diarios".

#31 Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Thoughts on the global economy, housing, gold, silver, interest rates, oil, energy, China, commodities, the dollar, Euro, Renminbi, Yen, inflation, deflation, stagflation, precious metals, emerging markets, and policy decisions that affect the global markets.

#32 Orangette

"A blog-style collection of stories, often autobiographical and always gastronomical..."

#33 Ikea Hacker

New and interesting ways to use (and reuse) your Ikea finds.

#34 Official Google Reader Blog

News, tips and tricks from the Google Reader team.

#35 The Daily Coyote

"Charlie came into my life when he was just ten days old, orphaned after both his parents were killed. He lives with me and a tomcat in a one-room log cabin in Wyoming."

#36 BibliOdyssey

Books, illustrations, science, history, visual Materia Obscura and eclectic bookart.

#37 Orcinus

"Spyhopping the right..."

#38 Guido Fawkes Blog

"Tittle tattle, gossip and rumours about Westminster's Mother of Parliments."

#39 Lawyers, Guns and Money

"Family, religion, friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business."

#40 My Old Kentucky Blog

"The MP3 Blog that puts some stank in it."

#41 How About Orange

"Visual treats and hands-on projects dreamed up in an orange office."

#42 Iain Dale's Diary

"Politics, commentary, humour, gossip."

#43 Bitch Ph.D

"A feminist, leftist and personal blog."

#44 PoppyTalk

"A Canadian design blog collecting inspiration and promoting emerging design talent."

#45 Alexa

"Web discovery machine" (The Alexa Blog).

#46 Cabel's Blog LOL

Cabel Maxfield Sasser's personal blog.

#47 Brooklyn Tweed

Knitting complemented by beautiful photography.

#48 Desire to Inspire

"An Australian and a Canadian trying to inspire the world, one room at a time."

#49 Adverlab

"Advertising tomorrow."

#50 Baghdad Burning

"... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend..."

How the results were calculated

Each blog was given a score out of 100 using the following formulas:

• Google Pagerank: 10%, scored from 0-10 using the actual PR
• Technorati Rank: 30%, scored from 0-30 by allotting each rank to a particular score, eg: 1-100, 101-500, 501-1000 etc.
• Bloglines subscribers: 20%, scored from 0-20 by allotting the number of subscribers to a score, eg: 10000+, 5000-9999, 3000-4999, etc.
• Google Backlinks: 20%, scored from 0-20 by allotting the number of backlinks to a score, eg: 20000+, 15000-19999, 12000-14999, etc.
• Alexa rank: 20%, scored from 0-10 by allotting the Alexa rank to a score, eg: 0-25K, 25-50k, 50-100k, etc.

For those who are interested to learn more about the scoring system I have used, take a look at the full breakdown for all five factors.

In cases where blogs had the same scores, I have used the actual Technorati rank to determine which blog ranked higher.

More information about the top ranking Blogger powered sites

Please note that this list is by no means definitive! While I have striven to discover all high ranking Blogger powered sites by searching through Technorati, Wikio Blogs, Bloglines, and any other blog list I could find, I may have missed some Blogger powered sites out.

Also, the scores I have given each blog were correct at the time of writing up this article (20th May 2008). The present scores may have changed slightly, especially the Technorati ranking (which updates every few hours), so please understand that the actual ranking may have changed, especially as time goes on).

I do welcome any suggestions for how this Top 50 list could be improved, or if you could suggest any sites which I may have missed that you feel should be included in this list.

You can download the Excel spreadsheet which I have used to gather data for and score the blogs on this list (plus a few others which didn't quite make it to the top 50).

More uses for this data?

I must admit that my reason for compiling this list was not merely to rank the top 50 blogs, but also to understand why these blogs have become popular.

Over the next few weeks I'll be looking at other aspects than ranking in these popular blogs to see what other useful insights can be gleaned from this research to publish as articles here at Blogger Buster.

As always, I appreciate your input so feel free to leave your comments and opinions below.

I didn't notice this appearing on any of my blogs (I would have loved to see a sneak preview of this!), though I would imagine this feature will be rolled out for Blogger in Draft soon, as can be seen in this screenshot:

I can't help wondering if the Blogger team may even add more functionality to this feature once it's ready to be released properly. Perhaps this could be used as the basis for a popular posts widget (powered by Blogger rather than a third party script)..?

If you're impatient to use such functionality for your blog posts before Blogger release this, you could try the "star ratings" widget offered by Outbrain.

I'd love to know what you think about this upcoming feature for Blogger, so please feel free to leave your comments and opinions below.

This development was announced by Jeff Veen at the South by Southwest conference held a few weeks ago:

Many of you may remember when Google acquired Measure Map, our analytics product for blogs. When we came to Google, our first job was to take the experience of providing clear, accessible reports, coupled with powerful tools for analysis, and apply it to Google's already robust Analytics product. The result of that collaboration launched last May, in the redesigned Google Analytics interface.

Since then the team has been hard at work fulfilling our original promise: to help bloggers understand the impact that their blogs are having on the world. To that end, we've rebuilt Measure Map as an integrated feature of both Google Analytics and Blogger. We hope you like what you see (via Google Analytics Blog)

Now I have to say that this development is something I have been hoping to see for some time! Such statistics present in the dashboard of our Blogger powered blogs would certainly save us time and effort visiting many different sources for information of blog development, backlinks and the like.

As soon as I hear news of any developments regarding this new interface, I will be sure to post it here!

In the meantime, I'm working on a post outlining the different methods currently available to Blogger users for statistical reporting of our blogs, so be sure to subscribe for news of future posts!

Recent Bug Fixes

The most significant bug fixes include:

• The "Add another image" link in the image upload window now works even before you have specified an image to upload.
• Better predictability for auto-completion of labels in the post-editor's label field.
• URLs in the Name / URL part of the comment form are now validated (this is a fix I've been hoping to see for some time!)
• The draft / published / scheduled filters on the Edit Posts list now work reliably in Internet Explorer (read more about Blogger's post schedule feature)

For the full list of bug fixes, pop over to read the post on Blogger Buzz.

Finding Help

If you take a look in Blogger's help section, you may notice a new link in the footer:

Now I have to say that the link text here is a little misleading. There is no new email system to contact the Blogger team directly. Instead this link will take you to Blogger's contact policy page which thoroughly explains how to find help and support for your Blogger related problems:

This page will surely be welcomed by new bloggers who previously were unaware of the process for getting help. Also, this makes clear the instances when email help may be offered:

• For login and blog access issues
• To report abuse of the Blogger system
• To report a bug to the Blogger team

All other support queries should be directed towards the Blogger help group or resolved by reading through the official Blogger help center instead.

If only Blogger would offer some sort of dedicated email support though: I'm sure hundreds of Bloggers would be incredibly happy!

Other News of Interest

CATCHPA Problems? Blame the Spammers!

Many Blogger users have complained about the problems deciphering Blogger's CATCHPA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart). From what I have read on other sites, I imagine this is linked to spammers having discovered a method of bypassing the earlier system in order to create spam blogs, many of which lead to sites which infect our computers with spyware.

Blogger have been trying hard to reduce spam in Blogger hosted blogs in recent months, and it seems the increased CATCHPA protection may be an effort to counteract the automated spammers invading this free service and giving Blogspot a bad name!

However, this increased CATCHPA security does have its downfalls. As ThatGrrl pointed out:

They're awful. I couldn't read them [...] If you are using word verification this is what you are inflicting upon your commenters (or those who choose not to translate the word verification and don't comment). (Source)

Because of this problem, many Bloggers may opt not to use comment verification. After a few complaints, I'm wondering if Blogger Buster should remove this too..

It seems that CATCHPA is no longer a viable tool for deterring spammers, but we can hardly blame Blogger for that! Any free service which can be manipulated by spam-bots will continue to be abused, whether this is Blogger or any other free hosting service. I only hope that the Blogger team may implement a solution soon which will be of benefit to us all.

Blogger adds XFN Support

If you've read through the recent bug fixes page, you would be forgiven for having overlooked this new feature.

XFN (XHTML Friends Network) is a way to demonstrate relationships between the authors of web pages by adding rel="me/friend/sibling/spouse/etc" to links in your blog or in the head section of your template.

Blogger now automatically adds a rel="me" statement in your blog's head section which links to your Blogger profile page. This demonstrates that your blog is owned and maintained by you, which is helpful for services such as LinkedIn, MyBlogLog and Ziki which use and understand these XFN relationships.

I'm going to write up a full post about XFN annotations and their uses in the near future which I hope will offer you a better understanding of how this works and how it XFN links may be implemented into your Blogger templates. In the meantime, you may want to take a look at the XHTML Friends Network site which offers an easy to understand introduction to XFN.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this summary of Blogger related news and updates. As always, your comments and opinions are much appreciated!

The Blogger Error Codes blog uses posts organized by labels attributed to a particular error code. When a particular error occurs, the error page references the bX-codes blog. If this matches an existing label, the body of the post attributed to this label is used to display a message to the user to inform them of the problem or explain that the Blogger team are aware of the problem.

Unfortunately, the error codes blog is not updated very often. This means we usually receive a default error message telling us to inform Blogger of the error code and a description of what was happening when this occurred.

Generally speaking such errors are resolved soon after they appear, especially when people report these error codes directly to Blogger to ensure Blogger employees are aware of the problem and it's scope more quickly.

But it can be quite frustrating to receive continual errors, so I've gathered a few resources which may offer some advice about the error codes you may receive and how these could be resolved:

• Report your bX-Error code to Blogger: Use this form to report your bX-codes to Blogger directly.
• The Real Blogger Status (BX codes Section): Chuck is doing a great job of documenting error codes and recent issues with Blogger. In this section of his blog, you'll find loads if useful information about bX-error codes, including their status and possible resolutions.
• Blogger Known Issues: Here the Blogger team document known issues and error codes with status when these issues are resolved.
• The Blogger Help Group: It may be helpful to search the official Blogger help group for the bX-code you have received. If this has been experienced before, others may have posted a solution. You may also want to report your error code here as Blogger employees do keep an eye on the help group.

As we can now report error codes directly to Blogger, I hope this will result help the Blogger team correlate and resolve specific codes more quickly. It would be reassuring to receive more messages on our error screens: "Engineers are aware of the problem and are working in a fix" is so much better than a default message telling us to report the problem!

If you know of other useful resources about Blogger's error codes, please let us know by leaving your comments below.

Blogger have now implemented a form which you can use to report bX error codes directly to the Blogger team. When using this form, you should provide the following information which will help the Blogger team determine the problem and find a suitable solution:

• The bX-code you received (eg: bX-1us3c3)
• A description of what you were doing when you received this error
• Your blog's URL
• The browser you are using (eg: Firefox or Internet Explorer 7)

I doubt that the Blogger team would be able to offer a personal response to each report they receive, but you can be assured that the team will be working on a solution to ensure these errors are fixed as soon as possible.

Use the link below to report your own bX-codes to Blogger:

Report bX error codes to Blogger

For more information about this, you may like to read the announcement on the Blogger help group. The Blogger help group also has many posts relating to known error codes, where you may find an solution to a problem you are experiencing with your blog.

I hope this information will be useful to many of you on the occasions when you may receive error codes when publishing your blog.