Editing Blog (section)

==Early popularity==
*'''Before 2006:''' The [[blogdex]] project was launched by researchers in the [[MIT Media Lab]] to crawl the Web and gather data from thousands of blogs to investigate their social properties. Information was gathered by the tool for over four years, during which it autonomously tracked the most contagious information spreading in the blog community, ranking it by recency and popularity. It can, therefore,{{original research inline|date=September 2012}} be considered the first instantiation of a [[memetracker]]. The project was replaced by [[tailrank.com]], which in turn has been replaced by spinn3r.com.
*'''2006:''' Blogs are given rankings by [[Alexa Internet]] (web hits of Alexa Toolbar users), and formerly by blog search engine [[Technorati]] based on the number of incoming links (Technorati stopped doing this in 2014). In August 2006, Technorati found that the most linked-to blog on the internet was that of Chinese actress [[Xu Jinglei]].<ref name="Fickling">Fickling, David, [http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2006/08/15/internet_killed_the_tv_star.html Internet killed the TV star], ''[[The Guardian]]'' NewsBlog, August 15, 2006</ref> 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 at the time.<ref>{{cite news|url=http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-08/24/content_672747.htm|title=Xu Jinglei most popular blogger in world|date=August 24, 2006|access-date=June 5, 2008|newspaper=China Daily}}</ref>{{Better source needed|date=October 2021}} Technorati rated [[Boing Boing]] to be the most-read group-written blog.<ref name="Fickling"/>
<!-- The section below is out of date, but interesting — someone want to follow up on it?
 [[Gartner]] forecast that blogging would peak in 2007, leveling off when the number of writers who maintain a personal Web site reaches 100 million. Gartner analysts expected 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 would later abandon their creation out of boredom. The firm estimated 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 (analogous to flotsam and jetsam). -->
*'''2008:''' {{as of|2008}}, blogging had "become such a mania that a new blog was created every second of every minute of every hour of every day."<ref>{{cite book|last1=Keen|first1=Andrew|title=The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture|date=2008|publisher=Nicholas Brealey Publishing|location=New York|isbn=978-1857885200|page=3}}</ref> Researchers have actively 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, [[permalink]]s can boost popularity more quickly and are perhaps more indicative of popularity and authority than blogrolls since they denote that people are reading the blog's content and deem it valuable or noteworthy in specific cases.<ref>Marlow, C. [http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cameron/cv/pubs/04-01.pdf Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110928143757/http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cameron/cv/pubs/04-01.pdf |date=September 28, 2011 }}. Presented at the [[International Communication Association]] Conference, May 2004, New Orleans, LA.</ref>