Top 25 Marketing Blogs sidebar added

I've added a section on the sidebar that has the Top 25 Marketing Blogs poll for each of the first 4 weeks. I'll add each week's new poll in this space.

Thanks to Ann, there have been a ton of new visitors to the Garden this week, and many of you have been checking out the Top 25 Marketing Blogs posts. I wanted to recap some of the basic criteria for this list:

- I use Alexa's traffic rankings to rank the blogs. So if your Alexa ranking is 400,000, and the #25 blog is 267,432, then you missed the cut.
- If you have a blog piggybacked on a website that Alexa can't distinguish from the website, I can't rank you, because Alexa is viewing the traffic from the website as being the BLOG'S traffic. Perfect example is Eric Kintz's blog for Hewlitt Packard. A great blog, but unfortunately Alexa sees it as a webpage on HP.com, so it gives the blog an Alexa traffic ranking of 102, which is the same as HP.com's.
- Your blog has to have a significant portion of its content devoted to covering marketing commentary and opinion. Yes this rule is a bit subjective, but this is to weed out blogs that are really Advertising or PR-related, but post the occasional marketing post.
- The list is updated every Monday. Occasionally, Alexa will be a pain and will go for longer than a week without updating it's traffic scores. This has already happened once. If this happens, I will still do an update, as I usually find at least one new marketing blog to put in the Top 25 every week.
- Blogs that cover only marketing news stories with little or no commentary/opinion, won't be included. Unlike most advertising blogs(AdRants, AdFreak), most marketing blogs lean more toward marketing theory/discussion/opinion, as you can see from reading the blogs on the Top 25 list. Again, this can be a bit subjective, but the key is if you are putting some effort to put your ORIGINAL thoughts and opinions behind a marketing news story, then that's fine.

That's it, clear as mud now, right? ;)