New York magazine has a very long and thorough article about the Web's most popular blogs, how they got there, how they stay there, and how you, too, could possibly start your own A-list
blog. Blogging, like Google's Page Rank system, is all about links--the more sites that link to you, the more popular the blog, inevitably. For example, Boing Boing, a curio site for tech community
folks, is the Web's most popular blog, according to blog measuring firm Technorati, with nearly 20,000 links. Once you hit that kind of popularity, the traffic will keep coming--and keep coming back,
too, as long as you post as often as you possibly can. A-list blogs also tend to link to each other, ensuring that blog users keep going round and round the same community of sites. This, in a way,
mirrors the insular offline world of the very wealthy, who also tend to hang around together, and keep getting wealthier--or at least so goes the theory of one sociologist quoted in the article. For
advertisers, of course, the whole lure of blogs is that they're cheaper than regular newspapers, TV and media Web sites, and often, they serve up tightly focused niche audiences, which advertisers
love. Blogs are also social connectors, because if one starts a conversation about, say, an ad, others will scoop it up quickly. And soon, the message is out to a vast network of tightly focused niche
groups.
Read the whole story at New York Magazine »
