A blog is a type of website that is updated with new content on a regular basis, usually daily or weekly. Most blogs are created and updated by a single person, and they develop a tone based on the opinions and ideas of that person. Successful blogs may evolve to the point where the original [...]
Blog Community
Blogs and bloggers, even though they are unrelated, form a loose community collectively referred to as the blogosphere. The blogosphere is catalogued and organized to some extent by online blog directories. In addition, many bloggers tend to link other related blogs to theirs via a listing of links to similar or supporting blogs called a blogroll. Trends in the blogosphere are often monitored as a gauge of public opinion and by marketers looking for direction in new advertising campaigns.
One form of directory used to organize the blogosphere is a blog search engine. A blog search engine allows users to search for blogs of particular subjects or to search within blogs for particular terms. Other blog directories include listings by genre and recommendations of the most popular blogs in each.
The blogging community has also developed a means through which the popularity of blogs can be measured. One method was the blogdex project created by MIT Media Lab. The project gathered information from thousands of blogs over the course of four years in order to learn how blog popularity spreads. The information has subsequently been used to develop ways in which the popularity of a particular blog can be increased.
Another means of measuring blog popularity is through a ranking system developed by Technorati, one of the largest blog search engines. These rankings are based on the number of incoming links for each blog and the number of hits each blog receives from anonymous user statistics gathered from Alexa tracking software.