I’ve been thinking about John Scalzi’s list of the top personal blogs in SF/F. For this iteration of the list, he allocated blogs to categories, depending on whether they’re written by a writer, an editor, a critic/commentator, an agent, an artist, or a fan. Now, admittedly, Scalzi’s explicitly saying the list isn’t definitive, and (particularly in sf?) an editor can be a writer can be a critic can be a fan can be an artist can (I guess, though I can’t think of an immediate example) be an agent, and so on. But here’s how the list breaks down as it stands:
| Category | % |
| Writer | 68.6 |
| Editor | 11.8 |
| Fan | 7.8 |
| Critic/Commentator | 5.9 |
| Artist | 3.9 |
| Agent | 2.0 |
I leave you to draw your own conclusions; but I would be interested to see the breakdown for a similar list of top-rated blogs in the wider litblogosphere.
vector-bsfa.com 
The only conclusion I would draw is that it’s pretty difficult to draw any conclusions by pigeonholing people who don’t easily fit into one. For instance, I don’t see what makes Making Light a blog of editors as opposed to fans, The Pagan Prattle is an art blog but much of the content is not about art, and I don’t see how James Nicoll is a critic but Nicolas Whyte is a fan. So given that the labels are somewhat arbitrary and give only a rough idea of what the person actually does, and given the limitations of the Technorati rankings, I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from it except that there are lots of SF writers who have popular blogs.
(There is a special circle of hell reserved for whoever coined the term “litblogosphere”.)
I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from it except that there are lots of SF writers who have popular blogs.
That’s pretty much what I take from it. That, and the follow-on that there don’t seem to be many popular sf blogs that aren’t by writers. I don’t think litblogs in general follow the same pattern, though, and I find that interesting. (I suspect the exclusion of group sf blogs skews the writer/non-writer ratio, but not by enough to change the overall pattern.)
Hah. Since my own blog isn’t on there this list is obviously irrelevant.
Most of the blogs listed there are blogs by science fiction [writers, editors, fans etc.] rahter than science fiction blogs anyway. It doesn’t say much about any sort of science fiction orientated blogcircle.