I wrote a quick program that extracted the blogs listed there and for each of them, I spidered the first page for links and checked to see if those links linked back to the original 50. Then my program created a network graph that displayed the connections while scaling the size of each site’s node proportional to the number of other sites linking to it. I used PHP to do the spidering and JavaScript to graph it out. The result of all this effort can be seen in the graphic to the above right.

Did I lose anyone yet?

All this effort to grade sites based on inbound links forms the basis for Google’s PageRank^tm algorithm. However, as mentioned before, popularity does not necessarily equal truthfulness.

So is there a better way to evaluate healthcare IT blogs? How can we sift through all of them to discover those worth reading, that is, the best health IT blogs?

Well, for that we’ll need to establish some rating criteria. That criteria might include

1. Post weekly?
2. Been around for a year?
3. Allow comments? (a blog without the ability to comment isn’t a blog!)
4. Interesting?
5. Company or individual?
6. Moderation ranking system, where bloggers from highly rated blogs have greater weight

What criteria would you add (or subtract) from this list?

Be sure to click on the above right graphic for a larger picture of the Health IT Blogosphere!

UPDATE: As it turns out, this algorithm is called TrustRank. The next step is to brush off my old linear algebra skills and calculate the intra-PageRank of these TrustRank select seed pages. Eigenvectors, here we come!