Top 30 Chess Blogs by order 
1: Boylston Chess Club Weblog
2: Susan Polgar
3: Satish Talim’s Chess Blog
4: The Daily Dirt Chess Blog
5: Confessions of a chess novice
6: In Honor Of Nezhmetdinov
7: Dave’s Chess Weblog
8: Chess improvement by effort (hatchoe)
9: MouseTrapper
10: Takchess Chess Improvement
11: An Experiment in Rapid Chess Improvement
12: Alabama Chess News
13: Tactics Tactics Tactics??
14: Self Flagellation to the Goddess Caissa
15: The Chess Mind
16: J’adoube
17: The Chess Wanderer
18: King of the Spill
19: The Maza Path to Chess Mastery
20: Patzer’s Mind
21: Magnifichess Chess Blog
22: Chess Training for Tactical Improvement
23: Improve Your Chess (or Die Trying)
24: ChessNonsense
25: Adventures in Georgia Tournament Chess
26: Pomaranch Captain
27: To drag out of the marsh the hippopotamus!
28: 65th Square
29: Pawn in the Game
30: Dennis M’s Chess Site
Thanks for listing all the blog sites. It’s cool to see the list.
Roger
I never knew there are so many blog sites.
Divo
Susan, thanks for including my chess blog amongst your list.
I think it is important to let your readers know the source of this list. It is the chess industry list from Blogshares. Blogshares is a stock market trading game where virtual shares of Blogs are traded. Blogs are valued by their links from other blogs and the rankings in the list you have posted represents each blog’s Blogshare valuation.
It’s important for readers to know that these rankings do not reflect anything like most read, most hits, most page views or any other measure of actual readership and popularity. We all know what the most read chess blog is.
For the record, I’m not sharing this information because I’m unhappy with list … after all, you have my blog ranked #1.
DG – Boylston Chess Club Weblog
Thank you for explaining it to everyone. That is why I created a link to blogshares in the heading. This way, everyone can read it 🙂
Best wishes,
Susan Polgar
http://www.SusanPolgar.com
http://www.PolgarChess.com
just found your site – like the graphics!bulgarian property off plan
Magnifichess has a good strategy: he has over 50 blogs registered with blogger.com, each with links to all his other blogs. 🙂
bdk, what is the benefit of that? 🙂
Best wishes,
Susan Polgar
http://www.SusanPolgar.com
Your value at blogshares.com is determined by how many links other blogs have to your blog. Hence, if you have 100 blogs and link them all to each other, voila!
But what is the big deal if you link to yourself? 🙂 Why would anyone do that?
Best wishes,
Susan Polgar
http://www.SusanPolgar.com
http://www.PolgarChess.com
What BDK means is that it is easy to falsely inflate the value of your site on Blogshares.
There are other listings of Chess Blogs (including one at The Boylston Chess Club’s Blog) that rank using different criteria, including these two:
Kenilworth Chess Club’s Chess Blogs
Technorati’s Chess Blogs
The Kenilworth blog list is the best listing of chess blogs out there, bar none.
The Technorati list has the same shortcomings as the Blogshare list, but with the added shortcoming that you actually have to go and register to even be considered. Talk about sampling bias!
At Wikipedia, their in-need-of-revision Chess Blogs entry says that “The most popular chess blog is The Daily Dirt Chess Blog maintained by Mig Greengard.” It is not clear upon which this is based, though for all I know it is true.
Susan said:
But what is the big deal if you link to yourself? 🙂
Welcome to the world of deceipt and fraud. Linking to yourself puts you high on the polls, that’s what it is all about.
I agree, Peter. It is meaningless if you link 100 sites to yourself. I did not even know that this can be done to the site to get shares up. I still don’t get it. So even if you get your site ranking up, what is the benefit of it beside fulfilling personal ego?
Best wishes,
Susan Polgar
http://www.PolgarChess.com
http://www.SusanPolgar.com
I am sure that you have “never” come across it in the chess world….(cough cough)…..but some people try to gratify their ego at all costs.
😉
I agree that it makes little rational sense to inflate your share price when there is no monetary payoff for it (and little ethical sense when there is). But everyone has an interested motive for blogging in the first place – whether it is to promote chess, to promote their chess club, to build their virtual social networks, to raise their virtual esteem, etc. Manipulating your virtual share price is little different from manipulating a real share price, only it is done in an economy of virtual esteem rather than any real monetary economy.
And I would not discount the profit motive here either. In the odd case of Magnifichess, for example, he appears to be trying to promote site names in the hopes of actually selling them (likely to spammers who are always looking for highly ranked URL’s to buy to generate traffic – however worthless the sites or the traffic might be).
And, yes, they might just be doing it for “ego.”
The larger question you raise is one of “value.” Value after all can mean “quality” or simply “esteem.” Gold is pretty much worthless except that it is esteemed by many. Shares in many of the internet companies of the 90s were inflated well beyond what quality they contained. The same goes for internet sites: there are those that have quality content (such as “The Chess Mind”) and those that get linked to by others for whatever reason. A site like Blogshares is not going to always help you determine quality–just as the Wall Street Journal is not always going to help you make profitable stock picks. What people esteem is not always based on quality or anything rational.
Another issue is that all of these rankings are generated by computers. It would be hard for it to be otherwise, since the human energy involved in making rankings in so many areas would be astronomical. But it is hard for a computer to determine quality. They are getting better, of course, just as computers are getting better at pickng good chess moves. Google set the standard of determining quality by esteem (or how many people link to you). But they also had to develop mechanisms for protecting against manipulations and other quirks of the internet world. Without those mechanisms, you are not going to get a good ranking — unless you have a relatively disinterested human (hard to find) helping with the results.
Or, unless you give it time… The “chess industry” (a wonderful oxymoron) is sill young. And quality always rises over time.
Thanks Michael for the explanation!
Best wishes,
Susan Polgar
http://www.PolgarChess.com