What makes a blog post popular?

The people at mSpoke blog started their series with a very interesting topic: What makes a blog post popular.

To start, we’ll need a bunch of feed items and measures of popularity and writing quality. For the popularity measure, I will use the feed item’s NewsGator attention score. While Newsgator has done some additional work to renormalize the scores to range from 0 to 10 since this post, it should give you a good idea about what factors into an item’s score. Put simply, the larger the NewsGator attention score, the more popular the feed item.