The list of the top 25 blogs was released yesterday.

I unfortunately did not make the top 25 this year - close but not enough. I am honored to be placed anywhere on this list, be it number 1, number 32 or even 115. The way I look at it is that people are enjoying the content I write on my blog and think it is useful, and the ranking I received - is for me a great vote of confidence and makes me extremely proud!

Sure there are benefits of being a top 25 Blogger - be it advertising opportunities on your blog, exposure and there others I am sure (and perhaps also the prospect of being hired by VMware/EMC/Veeam/NetApp). But we do not do it for those reasons.

I blog partly for my own benefit of having a place of reference to document things that I come across during the day, but also because I feel that I have people can benefit from the knowledge that I have to share. I think that I can say for certain that every single one of the top 25 bloggers do it for the same reason. We do not get paid for this - we do it because we enjoy it.

I would like to make a few observations I had on the results.

1. I am happy to see that there are at least two new scripting bloggers that have been added to the list. This is becoming more and more important as environments grow larger and larger. Congratulations both to William Lam and to Luc Dekens on their places in the top 25. Very well deserved!
2. You do not have to blog every day with something new to become a popular blog. There are some bloggers on the top 25 list that have not posted more than 15 posts in the last 3 months. Which leads me to believe that people did not really read the criteria that Eric posted when the voting opened, and did make this into some kind of popularity contest.
3. There are several top bloggers that have moved under the employment of a major vendor over the past 6 months. It seems that the amount of time that these people now have left to blog during their day is not as much as they had before, and therefore there blog updates have suffered both in quality and in quantity, and they have slipped down in the list.
4. The amount of votes - 860 - was extremely low (IMHO). Last week I went out for a drink with Frank Denneman and Kenneth van Ditmarsch - they both brought up the subject which makes you wonder.
   
   If you take into account the number of unique views per day that each of use see on our blogs
   (I know for example Duncan Epping has over 5,000 / day and I am sure that Chad Sakacc has a good number per day as well), that seems to be a very low number. Either our statistics are wonky - or the public is not that interested in participating in voting (but elections have never been a really popular subject..)

Congratulations to all the top 25 bloggers!!

You can follow Eric Siebert's new feed of the top 25 blogs

I have updated my Top 25 bloggers Twitter list.

This as always gives me more motivation to continue to think of new ideas to provide good content for the blog. Thank you to all of those who voted and especially to those who voted for me.