Bloggasm

The Wall Street Journal has a piece out today reporting that the “most popular” lists you’ll see on the sides of news sites to denote the most-viewed articles are significant traffic drivers to those articles. It creates a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy by making them even more popular. I attended an event hosted by YouTube a few months ago and a spokesperson there said that the company’s “related videos” section can keep users on the site for an hour or more clicking through videos.

This certainly mirrors my own reading habits. The New York Times has a “most emailed” and “most blogged” list and I’ll often click on stories from there after reading an article. But I’ve always wondered how many blogs would have to link to an article before it makes it onto this list?

To find out I copy and pasted the links to each of today’s top 10 most-blogged items on the NY Times front page into Google Blogsearch.

The average number of links required was 46. Though one of the articles had as few as 17 inbound links, most fell between 30 and 50. The most popular of the articles had 95 inbound links.

Below are the stats:

1. Overhaul Likely for Credit Cards
Inbound links: 95

2. U.S. to Offer New Mileage and Emission Standards
Inbound links: 51

3. Ex-U.S. Envoy in Talks for Key Role in Afghan Government
Inbound links: 31

4. Dan Brown’s America
Inbound links: 55

5. Senate Passes Bill to Restrict Credit-Card Practices
Inbound links: 50

6. Senate Democrats Won’t Provide Money to Close Guantnamo
Inbound links: 64

7. Changes Planned for Guantnamo Trials May Lead to Familiar Challenges
Inbound links: 17

8. Seeking a Missing Link, and a Mass Audience
Inbound links: 34

9. In Praise of Dullness
Inbound links: 32

10. San Francisco Mayor Wants Smokers to Pay for Butt Cleanup
Inbound links: 31