Bloggers' Year In Review

Blogs might seem as humdrum as chat rooms in a year or so, but blogging's promise was palpable in '04--and market research firm Intelliseek says it knows where the eyeballs were and what they were looking at. Intelliseek's BlogPulse.com gauged the popularity of everything from Web sites to blogs, from media stories to products, by counting the number of times bloggers linked to sites or mentioned specific subjects during the year.

The most linked-to blogs were BoingBoing, which considers itself "a directory of wonderful things," and political animals DailyKos and Instapundit. Picture-sharing site Hello, and quiz-obsessed sites Quizilla! and Memegen were the most popular Web sites; Yahoo! News beat The New York Times site and BBC's site; Johnny Depp and Hilary Duff caused bigger stirs than other celebs; Bush beat Kerry, again; and for some reason, BBQ was compared against football in the "recreation" category and actually held its own until the season started.

Among social networking sites, Orkut gave Friendster a run for its money through much of '04, until Friendster jumped ahead in September; Gmail was discussed far more than Yahoo! or Hotmail; the iPod was referred to more than TiVo or any other gadget; and the StarsWars trilogy, DVD was the most popular Amazon product cited.

On a lighter note, Iraq generated more discussion than any other rogue state in Bush's Axis; Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" was the only documentary to register en masse; bedfellows anger and greed dominated the other seven deadly sins; and in the oxymoronic "man's inhumanity" category, torture and abuse had its day in May.

To put things in perspective, an Intelliseek spokeswoman estimated that personalities were cited close to four million times in 2004, and news sites were linked to approximately 2.2 million times.

Separately, Lycos yesterday named the five most popular blog topics of 2004. The findings were limited to bloggers and bloggees who rely on its Web page-building sites Tripod and Angelfire--estimated by a company spokeswoman to exceed, collectively, some 20 million monthly visitors. The topics, in order of popularity, were entertainment, personal journals, education, health/fitness/parenting/babies/pregnancy, and politics. The two most popular sites were Hollywood gossip captainhoof.tripod.com, and fiction storytelling site blubberybastard.tripod.com.

BlogPulse.com's year in review can be reviewed in its entirety at http://www.blogs2004.com

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