Popularity of Blogging

Blogs were first introduced in 1993, and after a slow start, the activity rapidly gained in popularity with the introduction in 1998-9 of the first hosted blog tools such as LiveJournal, Open Diary and blogger.com

There are two ways in which to measure the popularity of blog:

• popularity through affiliation (i.e. blogroll)
• popularity through citations

Researchers have found that whilst it takes time for a blog to become popular through blogrolls, permalinks can boost popularity more rapidly. Permalinks may be more indicative of popularity and authority than blogrolls, as they show that people are actually reading the blog's content and deem it valuable or noteworthy in specific cases.

Technorati gives blogs rankings based on the number of incoming links; in August 2006, they found that the most linked-to blog on the Internet was that of Chinese actress Xu Jinglei, with more than 50 million page views. They rated Boing Boing to be the most-read group-written blog.

Gartner Research forecasted back in 2006 that blogging would peak in 2007, levelling off when the number of writers who maintain a personal Web site reached 100 million. They also predicted that the novelty value of the medium would wear off as most people who were interested in the phenomenon would have already checked it out, and new bloggers would offset the number of writers who have abandoned their blog 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" (analogous to flotsam and jetsam); that is to say, unwanted objects on the Web.

However, whilst personal blogs may have levelled out, the number of business blogs was set to rise in popularity in 2009.