George, Gautam, Tiffany and Heather are among those who’ve beaten us to the punch in announcing the Career 100 — so I guess our little secret is out. Many recruiting, HR, leadership and career-advice bloggers have already added their blogs to the list; we’re up to 133 blogs now, and I’m sure we’ll be adding many more.

So, what is the Career 100, and why did we create it?

In preparing to launch the RiseSmart Blog, we wanted to find a useful way to contribute to our corner of the blogosphere.   One of the first things we realized is that the blogosphere is huge, and there’s currently no easy way to sort the wheat from the chaff, particularly in a specific niche like career-oriented blogs.

Technorati is great for ranking blogs overall, but if you’re interested in blogs about a particular subject, Technorati is not that helpful.  Technorati’s tagging system lets users determine in which categories their blog belongs — up to 20 categories. As a result, if you run a blog search for any HR or career-oriented term, you’ll have to sort through a whole lot of blogs that have little to do with career information and advice.

The Career 100 was designed to solve this problem. 

Some background and a few notes:

• The Career 100 ranking system is based on an algorithm used by Advertising Age, which was created by marketing blogger Todd And.
• The Career 100 was programmed by the same team that put together the Healthcare 100, which has become one of the most valuable and heavily used resources in the health and medical blogosphere.
• Since the Healthcare 100 was launched last June, it has grown to include more than 650 different blogs — from the personal diaries of ambulance drivers, to the viewpoints of pharmacists and medical journalists, to blogs documenting the emerging Health 2.0 movement.
• The Career 100 adds one feature that neither the AdAge Power 150 or Healthcare 100 has — the ability for readers to rate blogs (by clicking the “rate this blog” link under each blog’s name).

We hope that, over time, the Career 100 will be an increasingly valuable resource to jobseekers, career counselors, HR managers, recruiters, and others who take an active interest in people’s work lives.  Furthermore, we believe it’s in the interest of all HR, recruiting and career-advice bloggers to help make that happen — because career blogs currently don’t have nearly as high a profile as, say, marketing or healthcare blogs.

We think the Career 100 can increase the collective influence of all bloggers in this space by making it easier for people — including the media — to find us.

So — here’s where we ask for your help:

• If your blog isn’t currently on the list, please add it! 
• Our algorithm includes you; you can impact the results by rating blogs yourself — so please do.
• Complaints are welcome — but be specific, so we can make changes where needed. 

That’s it for now, I guess.   Please let us know your thoughts about this important project.   And thanks to those of you who have already welcomed RiseSmart to the blogosphere with your e-mails and phone calls.