Top 25 Economics Blogs on Del.icio.us

			number
rank			of saves
1		Freakonomics	3152
2		Marginal Revloution	1132
3		The Big Picture	890
4		The Becker-Posner Blog	707
5		Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal	644
6		Greg Mankiw's Blog	570
7		Calculated Risk	296
8		Economist's View	292
9		EconLog	273
10		Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis	259
11		Econbrowser	249
12		Cafe Hayek	228
13		Daniel Drezner	226
14		Asymmetrical Information	205
15		New Economist	189
16		Nouriel Roubini's Blog	189
17		Environmental Economics	156
18		Tim Harford	136
19		Free Exchange at Economist.com	132
20		Angry Bear	129
21		Knowledge Problem	120
22		The Sports Economist	111
23		Oligopoly Watch	110
24		macroblog	107
25		Dani Rodrik's weblog	106

This information is provided with no warranty. The original list from which I worked was created by searching on "tag:economics tag:blog" in del.icio.us. For me to consider a site an economics blog, it generally had to have at least one URL bookmarked with "economics" as one of the top two tags and "blog" as one of the top four, and I eliminated some sites just because they didn't look like blogs to me. I tried to combine the number of saves for multiple URLs pointing to the same site, but there were undoubtedly some that I missed, and the decision as to what constitutes "pointing to the same site" was a subjective one. (I also ignored bookmarks pointing to particular posts within a blog.)

I'm working on a more comprehensive list (maybe the top 150, or something like that), but I may just give up, because this is turning out to be a lot harder than I expected. Maybe it will get easier if del.icio.us develops better search tools.


UPDATE: Corrected spelling of "Posner" and "Harford".

Word Verification

I hate to do this, but I turned on word verification. The spam is just getting way out of hand. The spammers are particularly annoying, becuase they don't even do a good job of matching spam comments to the topic at hand when there is a good match to be made. I once did a post that made reference to "the best Belgian chocolate". I just discovered a spam comment about "the best Belgian chocolate" in another one of my posts -- a post that had nothing to do with either Belgium or chocolate. I don't even object to a few commercial comments if they stay on topic, but the bots just seem to behave randomly.

Idea for Blogger

For an ordinary blogger like me, the spam comments seems to come mostly with a delay of at least a few weeks (presumably after the spambots have decided which posts to spam), whereas most of the legitimate comments come within a few days. I’d rather not subject legitimate commenters to those annoying human-readable text tests if I don’t have to. Here’s my suggestion: Blogger should have a time delay (chosen by the blogger) before applying the test. So if you comment within, say, the first 3 days, your comment will go straight through, whereas if you comment a month later, you’ll be subject to a security check. (Or do they already have this feature, and I don’t know about it?)

Vacation

I will be on vacation from tomorrow (Nov. 3) until the following Friday (Nov. 10) and probably will not be posting. But just in case I get inspired (perhaps for a post about the economics of off-season retailing in resort areas) I'm testing out posting via email using my Blackberry (hence the tag at the bottom). If you're reading this, I guess that means the test was successful.
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Stumbling

I have to mention Chris Dillow of Stumbling and Mumbling, because he has so many interesting things to say. As far as I can tell from his profile, he is not really an economist, but for someone who plays an economist on the Internet, he gives a very convincing performance. He seems to write from the perspective of a sensible left-wing libertarian. There are sensible left-wingers, and there are sensible libertarians, and there are left-wing libertarians, but it never occurred to me before that you could get all three into one package.

Unpronounceable?

Everybody says my nom de blog is unpronounceable. First of all, if you can’t pronounce it, just spell it out, and you’ll do just fine. Second of all, if people spent more time on important things like Indo-European paleolinguistics instead of silliness like settling international conflicts and engineering economic growth, they would realize that N can be pronounced as a vowel. Vocalic N is a standard feature in proto-Greek. If only some pre-Homeric bards would read my blog, we’d be off and running.

Rolling On About Blogs

Even though Dean Baker and I are both “liberal Democrats” (he more than I, I think, or at least he’s more loyal), I seem to disagree with him more often than I agree with him. Nonetheless, I am quite impressed with his blog. I’m something of an academic snob when it comes to economics blogs: that is, I’m hesitant to “waste my time” on any blog that isn’t written by someone with the title “Professor”. (For example, you’d have a hell of a time getting me to read my own blog – at least until I realized how smart the author is:) However, I find that Dean Baker makes up in provocative thought for what he lacks either in academic credentials or in agreeing with me.

Other non-academic blogs that I like: Economics Unbound (Michael Mandel of Business Week), Brad Setser (international finance; not an easy read, but he clearly knows his stuff better than most), Battlepanda (Angelica Oung, though lately she seems to be leaving it mostly to her co-bloggers). That last one is kind of an outlier in my blog space: as far as I know, Angelica doesn’t even have an advanced degree, much less an academic appointment, but I like her writing, and her perspective seems unique. (I could say that Angelica is my link into the lefty/feminist/youth blogosphere, but she seems rather to the right among the lefties.)

Now that I’ve mentioned the non-academics, I should be true to my snobbery and give the prominent final position to the academics. Brad DeLong and Greg Mankiw are the acknowledged kings, and they provide a nice political counterpoint to each other. Also excellent are Econbrowser (James Hamilton, the energy macroeconomics and time series analysis expert, with Menzie Chinn, who writes mostly about international finance issues), Economist’s View (Mark Thoma, University of Oregon, leaning left but more faithful to economic analysis than many on the left), macroblog (David Altig of the Cleveland Fed and the University of Chicago), and EconLog (Arnold Kling and Bryan Caplan, who lean right/libertarian). [A few others that I have to mention: William Polley (academic; interesting but not prolific); New Economist (academic?? I don’t know, but many of the posts certainly are); Angry Bear (distinctly left-leaning and often more about politics than economics; academic?? Again I don’t know). As for Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok), being a macro guy, I seldom read it, but everyone else seems to.]

Not in Kansas any more

After I adopted the name (but before I started this blog), I did a blog search and discovered that there is another “knzn” in the blogosphere. His interpretation of the name is apparently geographic and has nothing to do with macroeconomics. Since his blog entries appear to have ended more than a year ago, and his subject matter is quite different, I’m hopeful that there will be no confusion.

[This post has no content.]

Come on, guys, I'm not a real blogger. I just comment on other people's blogs...