If writing is a solitary pursuit, blogging is decidedly not....


Unlike other forms of publishing, blogging is immediate and social, which means bloggers tend to make all kinds of contacts and meet all sorts of people online.
Over the past few weeks, my new best friend is Mack Collier, who blogs at Beyond Madison Avenue and The Viral Garden and is (as of last week) a contributor to this blog, too.
Mack's most recent 15 minutes of fame comes from a weekly series of "top 25" lists he's generated over the past four Mondays, highlighting the most popular marketing and advertising blogs. Take a look at the original "Top 25 Marketing Blogs."
"I mainly wanted to do it for myself just to track how the blogs are performing over time, because I thought it was interesting," Mack said. "I figured some other bloggers would take notice, but I had no idea it would be anything like this."
But like I said: Bloggers are a social bunch, and they thrive on feedback. The original post generated a ton of comments and links, both from those who were counted and from those who were shut out. Since then, Mack has promised to update his list weekly. (See his latest "Top 25" list here.)
By the way, Mack's list relies on stats supplied by Alexa, which ranks blogs according to its own "secret sauce" formula of traffic/pageviews determining traffic ranking. Because Alexa rankings are based on tracking from those who use its toolbar, some say the results are oddly skewed in favor of those who, well, use the toolbar. Mack admits Alexa has its shortcomings, yet says he believes Alexa is more accurate than link aggregators such as Technorati, because it does attempt to measure actual traffic instead of just counting links.
Either way, there's some great blogs on Mack's Top 25 list. For those of you looking to expand your regular reads, that list is a great place to start. And, by the way, several of the top 25 marketing bloggers moonlight as contributors to the MarketingProfs Daily Fix. There's Mack himself, of course, as well as Harry Joiner, BL Ochman, and Seth Godin.
(For the record, the MarketingProfs Daily Fix is not tracked in Mack's list because it doesn't have a unique domain to distinguish its traffic from other MarketingProfs traffic. For that matter, neither is Marketing Excellence, by HP's Eric Kintz.)