If comScore was looking for buzz, its survey on the blogosphere did the job. The results were interesting but not terribly surprising: blogs are getting more popular (50 million unique visitors in the U.S. in the first-quarter), people who reads blogs tend to be more affluent, have a high-speed Internet access and access the Web quite often; and political/news blogs are the most popular category. The real excitement was sparked by comScore's traffic numbers (Freerepublic.com was the most popular with 3.6 million unique visitors) as some publishers were miffed by the ranking. Jason Calacanis, in particular, took exception to Weblogs Inc.'s traffic not being consolidated like Gawkers. He insinuated it may have been because Gawker - along with Six Apart - paid comScore to do the survey. The whole mess, which picked up steam today, has been dubbed comScoregate by Calacanis, who has made it a personal mission to tear the comScore survey apart. Aside from the ego/pride/hubris involved in who's more popular, which I guess is important if you're pursuing advertisers, the survey raised the concept of how to quantify a blog's popularity. Is it the number of links (Technorati); is it unique visitors (comScore); or some other harder-to-define factor such as relevance or influence or buzz? This is a topic that I've explored in the past.
Update: I just finished reading a great post on the log ranking challenge by Mary Hodder, who proposes the idea that relevance and influence should be part of the mix - rather than simply links into a particular blog. It's a lengthy read but well worth the time if you're interested in or curious about the blog search/ranking area.