Nick Denton's stable of professional blogs offers a great set of sources for studying the whims of the linkfest that is the blo-go-sphere. While we are all churning up the water with studies about the quality and comprehensiveness of blog search engines, we might at least have some confidence in aggregate trends over time, regardless of our opinions of any isolated results. Blogpulse's rank trends, appearing in the profiles section, shows how the rank of a blog changes over time, where rank is computed from inlink counts.
What is interesting about Gawker media blogs is that they can be used to illustrate some very clear types of trends. Gawker and Wonkette have very similar rank trends which show a clear decline:
Rank trend for Gawker:
One the other hand, newer additions to the stable such as Kotaku, Screenhead, Gridskipper and Lifehacker show a clear ascending trend. Here is the rank trend for Kotaku (one of my favourites):
Finally, there are the other blogs in the set which show more varied or turn-around rank trends. Here is the rank trend for Defamer:
While one might be cautious to draw too strong a conclusion from these samples, it might be remarked that the older blogs are waning while the newer ones are still enjoying a flush of popular buzz.
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