A few days ago, someone at work asked about tips on getting traffic to their newly launched team blog. One of the responses suggested that the team should pick blogging at blogs.msdn.com instead of on MSN Spaces because the MSDN blogs get more traffic. This turns out to an example of the myopic view folks have of the blogging when they view it out of the lens of the blogs I read. I'm sure there are lots of bloggers who have never read a blog on MSN Spaces but read dozens on blogs.msdn.com, similarly there are millions of people who read blogs on MSN Spaces that don't even know blogs.msdn.com exists. The main advice the team got was to provide good content and traffic would follow.

However the discussion get me interested in the relative popularity of blogs on MSN Spaces compared to other blogging services. Below are the blogs hosted on MSN Spaces that are on the list of top 100 most linked blogs according to Technorati.

6.   spaces.msn.com/after1s - 27,380 links from 8,916 sites

7.    spaces.msn.com/lin28379801400 - 30,841 links from 8,506 sites

18.  spaces.msn.com/l1n - 16,733 links from 5,960 sites

21.  spaces.msn.com/lovingyo - 16,922 links from 5,215 sites

22.  Herramientas para Blogs - 14,396 links from 5,207 sites

25.  spaces.msn.com/members/MSN SA - 14,021 links from 4,802 sites

37.  The Space Craft - 11,235 links from 4,119 sites (the MSN Spaces team blog)

There two surprises here for me. The first is that two blogs hosted on MSN Spaces are in the top 10 most linked blogs tracked by Technorati and the second is that the MSN Spaces team blog is in the top 50. I'll be quite interested in seeing how these statistics change once Technorati figures out how to add MySpace blogs to their index.

Update: Added Herramientas para Blogs which I missed the first time around.