• Community and cataloging

The Blogosphere

The collective community of all blogs is known as theblogosphere. Since all blogs are on the internet by definition, they may be seen as interconnected and socially networked, throughblogrolls, comments,linkbacks(refbacks, trackbacks or pingbacks) and backlinks. Discussions "in the blogosphere" are occasionally used by the media as a gauge of public opinion on various issues. Because new, untapped communities of bloggers and their readers can emerge in the space of a few years,Internet marketerspay close attention to "trends in the blogosphere".[41]

Blog search engines

Several blog search engines are used to search blog contents, such asBloglines,BlogScope, andTechnorati. Technorati, which is among the more popular blog search engines, provides current information on both popular searches andtagsused to categorize blog postings.[42]The research community is working on going beyond simple keyword search, by inventing new ways to navigate through huge amounts of information present in theblogosphere, as demonstrated by projects likeBlogScope.[citation needed]

Blogging communities and directories

Severalonline communitiesexist that connect people to blogs and bloggers to other bloggers, including BlogCatalog andMyBlogLog.[43]Interest-specific blogging platforms are also available. For instance,Blogsterhas a sizable community of political bloggers among its members.Global Voicesaggregates international bloggers, "with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media."[44]

Blogging and advertising

It is common for blogs to feature advertisements either to financially benefit the blogger or to promote the blogger's favorite causes. The popularity of blogs has also given rise to"fake blogs"in which a company will create a fictional blog as a marketing tool to promote a product.[45]

• 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,permalinkscan 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.[46]

The blogdexproject was launched by researchers in theMIT Media Labto 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[original research?] be considered the first instantiation of amemetracker. The project was replaced bytailrank.comwhich in turn has been replaced by spinn3r.com[2].

Blogs are given rankings byTechnoratibased on the number of incoming links andAlexa Internetbased 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 actressXu Jinglei.[47]Chinese mediaXinhuareported that this blog received more than 50 million page views, claiming it to be the most popular blog in the world.[48]Technorati ratedBoing Boingto be the most-read group-written blog.[47]