This week, Swedish Start-up Com­pany Twingly launched its very own top-blog lists in twelve dif­fer­ent lan­guages. Their blog search is deliv­er­ing really good results, so it seems that the near future might look rather bleak for Tech­no­rati — and the best part is that my main blog daten­schmutz ranks #44 in the German-language list!

The over­all win­ner of the new rat­ing is — what a sur­prise — Tech­no­rati. And this is what Michael, or in this case Robin, thinks about the new charts:

The rat­ings are based on the so called Twingly blog-rank:

I have to agree — but the ques­tion is if and when Google will launch such a spe­cial­ized PageR­ank. Sooner or later they will be forced to do so, as the rapid dynam­ics of blogs calls for a dif­fer­ent mea­sure­ment, oth­er­wise the main index will become too clogged over time. But until then, I’m very very happy about num­ber 44, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that I’m writ­ing about a grow­ing, yet still pretty small niche com­pared to e.g. tabloid or pop cul­ture blogs.

Why the name datadirt?

I started datadirt only a cou­ple of months ago, but I’ve been blog­ging in Ger­man for some years — that’s actu­ally where the name of the blog comes from. My Ger­man blog is called daten­schmutz, which is a word­play, as the Ger­man term for pri­vacy pro­tec­tion is “Daten­schmutz”, while Schmutz lit­er­ally means dirt. So datadirt is the lit­eral trans­la­tion of the name — I got so used to it that I decided to stick with the name. Of course I’m not trans­lat­ing every sin­gle post­ing, but I really like blog­ging in two lan­guages; brushes up my writ­ten Eng­lish and enables me to blog about top­ics which are hot in the US but not in Europe. Take affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing for exam­ple: some of the best and most lucra­tive net­works out there only accept Eng­lish sites, as the net­work own­ers want to keep track of their affil­i­ate port­fo­lio. Very under­stand­able, but still a drag if you only oper­ate Ger­man sites. So to cut a long story short: thanks for your sup­port — and I hope datadirt will turn up in Twigly’s Eng­lish list next year — so thanks a lot for you inter­est and your support!