Popularity
Researchers have analyzed the dynamics of how blogs become popular. There are essentially two measures of this: popularity through citations, as well as popularity through affiliation (i.e. blogroll). The basic conclusion from studies of the structure of blogs is that while it takes time for a blog to become popular through blogrolls, permalinks can boost popularity more quickly, and are perhaps more indicative of popularity and authority than blogrolls, since they denote that people are actually reading the blog’s content and deem it valuable or noteworthy in specific cases.[15]
The blogdex project was launched by researchers in the MIT Media Lab to crawl the Web and gather data from thousands of blogs in order to investigate their social properties. It gathered this information for over 4 years, and autonomously tracked the most contagious information spreading in the blog community, ranking it by recency and popularity. It can therefore be considered the first instantiation of a memetracker. The project is no longer active, but a similar function is now served by tailrank.com.
Blogs are given rankings by Technorati based on the number of incoming links and Alexa Internet based on the Web hits of Alexa Toolbar users. In August 2006, Technorati found that the most linked-to blog on the internet was that of Chinese actress Xu Jinglei.[16] Chinese media Xinhua reported that this blog received more than 50 million page views, claiming it to be the most popular blog in the world.[17] Technorati rated Boing Boing to be the most-read group-written blog.[16]
Boing Boing
How popular are the following blogs? Examine how much participation each engenders. Put the URL in google and see how much each is mentioned at that ‘root’ URL.
Plug this into your browser and gauge results and authority to blogs:
technorati.com/search/semiotics?language=n
Technorati: Top 100 Most Popular Blogs (Speaking of Technoratio, Netdynam.org’s blog has achieved an authority rating of 2, and a rank 1,154,896.)
Selection of blogs to investigate under the fold
Group Blogs:
Mashable (#4 TR)
“Mashable is a leading tech blog focused on Web 2.0 and Social Networking news. With more than 5 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the most prolific blog reviewing new Web sites and services, publishing breaking news on what’s new on the web.”
ReadWriteWeb (#15 TR)
“ReadWriteWeb is a popular weblog that provides Web Technology news, reviews and analysis.”
Dooce (#36 TR)
Parenting
Giga Om (#38 TR)
web & tech
A List Apart
Copyblogger (TR #97)
Blogging & online marketing
Transgroupblog
“The Trans Group Blog is where you’ll find a working group of writers who have written about trans topics, and is intended to give voice to a diversity of voices within the trans community. “
Crooked Timber
-excellent blog roll too
Firedoglake
-group blog and also aggregates 7 blogs from founders within the group
Lake Sarasota
-community blog
Epiphenomenom
“At the intersection of science, atheism and humanism
Garden of Forking Paths
-Philosophy
American Revolution Blog
-music will play
Individual Blogs
The Pioneer Woman (#38 TR)
note-organized as 7 topic areas, each being the equivalent of its own blog
Ree Drummond: Photography, Family,Recipes, children, Cattle, Home & Garden, black heels to tractor wheels (etc.)
ChrisBrogan (TR #71)
Social media, community, marketing
Internet Time Blog
Jay Cross: adult learning
Misc.
Example: Technorati Blog Directory – Science
-Technorati’s directory is its weakest implementation
It’s hard to find what subject blogs specialize in, even harder to find blogs by specialty. Hard here being defined as: you have to know how to use google to find blog locations by their tags.
example: some blogs Stephen frequents
Cognitive Daily
Pharyngula
Cosmic Variance
Digital Ethnography
Culture Bot
John Hawkes
eLearn Space
Joho the Blog
Ghost of a Flea
Jonathan Mayhew
The Shifted Librarian
Integral Options
Dialogic
Using RSS and keyword agents, I scan postings for around 900+ blogs several times a week.
I would estimate the attrition rate on blogs in my reader is about 10-20% year.
the ultimate aim being to reduce a long list of blogs to a shorter list of blog types.
something like diigo – but in that case, each site has a summary attached.
this would be a summary of affordances and functions, with a list of blogs under each perhaps.
what i am proposing is a set of say, [meta]functions which blogs are seen to serve, as well as a wider set of non-definitive criteria (at a different logical leval of analysis) which can be used to group blogs together.
in the past email lists were grouped in a similar way as for example:
non/moderated
open/closed
private/public
academic/social,
etc
Kinda like a grad student or intern?
This strikes me as being interested in how blogs might be classified, but not too interested in actually visiting blogs per say. Which is okay, yet, the specific need for data does seem to require somebody’s time.
I assume a private list equivalent blog would be one that qualifies members via some version of credentialing.
The ND2.0 blog has implemented the minimal barrier: a commenter has to negotiate a captcha.
As a blog user, I don’t usually comment, so I’d be in the class of users who doesn’t afford themselves the opportunity to join in.
If you go to Technorati’s directory, the subject of many of the blogs it indexes is revealed.