Popularity

Continued

Blogdex was originally conceived as an online resource for monitoring topics for discussion that were in vogue at that time, throughout the blogosphere (which consists solely of blogs and their interactions with each-other. The term identifies the fact that blogs can exist as an interactive community, or as a collection of interactive communities, as well as a social network in which authors, regardless of their background and experience, can put forward their opinions for universal scrutiny).

The website made available a list of links to online content which had been referred to recently by more than one of the regularly monitored blogs. Every one of the links received a score on the basis of the number of different blogs that made reference to it, as well as and the frequency of the references. The list of links typically featured both items that were popular at that moment in time, as well as informative together with controversial original material relating to current topics of interest to the public at large.

Notwithstanding its central focus on blogs, it may still be regarded as the original memetracker (which is a tool for keeping track of the movement of memes, or fashionable ideas, throughout a group of people. The term normally refers to websites that either interpret blog posts to evaluate which web pages are being talked about or mentioned most frequently on the web, or that permit users to vote for links to web pages that they find of interest). Apart from this, Blogdex was, in fact, the seed for the development of subsequent commercial websites, such as tailrank.com, Digg.com, and other social networking sites.

Since he was the owner of the domains blogdex.com, blogdex.net and blogdex.org, Jimmy Wales (an American Internet entrepreneur) offered the domains to MIT, at no charge, for use in the blogdex project. At this point, blogdex then transformed itself from the original blogdex.media.mit.edu location to blogdex.net.

The blogdex project was instigated by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in order to crawl the web and accumulate data from thousands of blogs with the purpose of investigating their social characteristics. It gathered data for over 4 years, and duly tracked all types of information flowing through the blog community, ranking it in terms of frequency and popularity. Although the project is no longer in operation, the ideas have, to some extent, been replicated in the social network website, tailrank.com.

Technorati is an Internet search engine used for blog searches. It is the leading search engine in its field and, by June 2008, it had indexed 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million items of tagged social media. Web indexing involves allocating keywords or phrases to web pages or web sites so that they can be retrieved using a search engine.

Blogs are ranked by Technorati on the basis of the number of incoming links they receive. In August 2006, Technorati discovered that the blog with the greatest number of incoming links on the internet related to the Chinese actress Xu Jinglei. The Chinese news agency Xinhua stated that the blog received more than 50 million page views. On this basis, they claimed that it was the most popular blog in the world. Technoratis rating of the weblog Boing Boing made it the most-read group-written blog.

Blogging How To Succeed