| Recently, 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.
Recently, through the mass popularity of
sponsored post ventures such as PayPerPost
(now known as Izea) a large number of personal
blogs have started writing sponsored posts
for advertisers wanting to boost buzz about
new products and services. It has revolutionised
the blogosphere almost in the same way that
Google AdSense did.
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
thus 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 The project is no longer
active, but a similar function is now served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 also 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
listed the most linked-to blog as that of
Chinese actress Xu Jinglei and the most-read
blog as group-written Boing Boing.
Gartner forecasts that blogging will peak
in 2007, leveling off when the number of writers
who maintain a personal website reaches 100
million. Gartner analysts expect that the
novelty value of the medium will wear off
as most people who are interested in the phenomenon
have checked it out, and new bloggers will
offset the number of writers who abandon their
creation out of boredom. The firm estimates
that there are more than 200 million former
bloggers who have ceased posting to their
online diaries, creating an exponential rise
in the amount of "dotsam" and "netsam"
— that is to say, unwanted objects on
the Web.
It was reported by Chinese media Xinhua that
the blog of Xu Jinglei received more than
50 million page views, claiming to be the
most popular blog in the world.[20] In mid-2006,
it also had the most incoming links of any
blogs on the Internet.
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