Well there are several possible measures (and one very interesting candidate): offline recognition (i.e. PR exposure, number of mentions in news articles), traffic/reach, (Alexa rank), popularity amongst Bloggers (Technorati 100), hybrid measure of online popularity (Google Pagerank). The interesting thing is that there is no clear winner amongst these measures and that although there are similar rankings for top weblogs accross the board, there is one clear winner for Pagerank. It beats the Gawker media sites and Boingboing and Scripting with a Pagerank of 9 – PVRblog PVRblog also has the biggest gap between Pagerank and Alexa rank. These stats demonstrate something interesting – perhaps PVR blog shows the perfect scope for a vertical market weblog with maximum Google exposure for its traffic. I’m not entirely sure what this means, the difference should either disappear over time as a Pagerank of 9 drives more traffic and thus boosts Alexa rank…

Do Penis Enlargement Pills Work? is a weblog that has been aggressively linked to recently. Ostensibly it is a personal account of a guy from New York trying the type of product that is normally advertised in spam email. I’m fairly sure this a new type of marketing scam, a ‘Spamblog’, a fake personal blog designed specifically to drive Pagerank and visitors to a product? The evidence: 1. Only two products are mentioned throughout the blog. 2. They are mentioned too often and the links seem too judicious to be real. 3. The discussion of the results of the product are wholly positive (and this stuff is snake oil). 4. Both products have similar websites and are clearly distributed by the same company. 5. The ‘about me’ seems to generic, this is not a real person. So there you have it, I guess there will be more of these types…