[Updated 19-Nov-2004]
Robert Scoble wrote on September 30:
I get to see trends that happen over time. For instance, when I started blogging, tons of people would link to Jeffrey Zeldman. He's a design guru who's written great books on designing with Web standards and such. But lately no one has even mentioned him in the blogs I'm reading. Why?
Well, this got me curious so I looked up the PubSub LinkRank for zeldman.com and found that it was 648 on September 30, down from 629 the day before. Being the 648th most popular link destination isn't bad! But, what was it awhile ago? So, I dug into our databases and created a chart of the Linkrank for zeldman.com over time which I published in this blog. Time has passed, so I've dug into the database again and created a new chart which shows Zeldman.com's LinkRank going back to August: (Click on the image to see a larger version.)
Clearly, Zeldman was losing popularity rapidly back when Scoble first made his comments and he continued to lose popularity for some time afterwards. However, there has been a pickup lately -- which presumably indicates that while Zeldman may have gone through a period of publishing less-then-enthralling content, he has somewhat returned to being able to produce what readers find interesting -- or, at least bloggers want to link to (there is a difference there...). But, of course, one can't really be sure what is going on unless you study the day-to-day publishing and linking history -- not just the rough evidence of results as shown by LinkRanks.