What makes a good blog, and how much can you value a popular blog?

So, how does our Master Of All Universes justify his expelling of his co-bloggers?

Overcoming Bias began in November ‘06 as a group blog on the general theme of how to move our beliefs closer to reality, in the face of our natural biases such as overconfidence and wishful thinking, and our bias to believe we have corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing.

While we had a few dozen authors, most posts came from myself, Robin Hanson, and my fantastic co-blogger, Eliezer Yudkowsky. The topics eventually drifted more widely, and early in ‘09 Eliezer decided to move to a new sister blog, Less Wrong. I decided this was a good time to convert this to be my personal blog. My colleague Tyler Cowen had warned me from the start that blogs were best defined not by topic but by lead author personalities, and well, I’d learned he was right.

So while Overcoming Bias will no doubt continue to discuss many of the same topics, I will no longer feel constrained by topic. While I may allow guest posts from time to time (Eliezer will always be welcome), this is now just my personal blog, where I’ll post on whatever I like.

#1. Alternatively, our Master Of All Universes could have started from scratch a brand-new blog at RobinHanson.net. He took over Overcoming Bias because it has a Google PageRank of 7/10, a very good grade, worth a lot, and obtained thanks to the effort of his community.

#2. Blogs as conduit for charisma.

1. Midas Oracle = The blog of a bombastic flake and his friends.
2. Odd Head = The blog of a curious but polite researcher.
3. Mercury = The blog of the good Boy Scout of the prediction market field.
4. Toronto Prediction Market Blog = The smart blog of a prediction market rationalist that Robin Hanson tries hard to ignore.
5. Wiser Than The Crowd = The blog of a person who obsesses with trading on InTrade and who discloses publicly his earnings to the IRS.
6. A Computer Scientist in a Business School = The blog of a researcher who does not get that mainstream people want to assess the non-statistical accuracy of a single prediction market once it has expired.
7. TechCrunch = The blog of virulent Michael Arrington and the verbose people he hired to fill in a gazillion of verbose posts.
8. TechDirt = The blog of Michael Masnick and a small bunch of other people whose thinking is compatible with his.

NEXT: Are good blogs driven by author personalities or by well drilled topics?