MnIndy 29th on Technorati’s list of top U.S. politics blogs « Minnesota Independent: News. Politics. Media.

Technorati’s just-updated list of U.S. politics blogs has a new addition: The Minnesota Independent now makes the cut, and after starting out at number 34, we’re now ranked 29th in the top 100 list, with Technorati authority at 762 on a scale of 1,000. Thanks to a new algorithm that calculates a blog’s authority, though, these numbers can drastically change from day to day.

According to the Personal Democracy Forum, Technorati — a blog search engine which keeps running measurements of the blogosphere — has switched to a new algorithm that takes a more immediate snapshot of a blog’s authority (authority is “based on a site’s linking behavior, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time”). So, instead of generating its rankings based on six months worth of metrics, as it used to, it’ll look only at the past month — which means rankings in the top 100 can change somewhat radically. On Wednesday, the company’s blog explained:

“With the new algorithm, the resulting Authority will better reflect the fast-changing nature of the blogosphere. Its new inherent volatility will also show which blogs are rising and falling in authority, rewarding authors on posting frequency, context and linking behavior, as well as other data inputs.”

The only other Minnesota blog making the list — dubbed the “definitive Top 100 list of blogs” by the Washington Post –is Powerline, which comes in at number 11, just before FiveThirtyEight.com.

A notable absence from the list: our hugely popular sister site, the Washington Independent, doesn’t make the cut?

That’s because it’s on a separate list of American political news sites — at number one, according to Technorati’s metrics. When news sites and political blogs are ranked together, it appears fourth on the top-100 list. (On this combined list, Powerline is ranked at 13 and MnIndy at 33, as of Saturday.)

There are plenty of reasons why these lists are the way they are: Corporate news sites, in many cases, still resist linking out to other sites, preferring instead to keeping their news as proprietary as possible — which likely hurts them on such rankings. Plus, site owners must “claim” their sites with Technorati to be included.

One local mainstream site making the cut is the Pioneer Press. Although curiously, while their web address appears, the title is listed as… Tom Powers, a sports writer at the paper. That’s marginally better than yesterday, when the St. Paul paper appeared by the name Green Bay Packers.