Back in 2007, my former employer and a current Mearra customer, Uusi Suomi, needed a way to measure and show what's hot and popular on their news site. We initially used Drupal's built-in node counter to list nodes ordered by daily page views. That worked for a while until we noticed the apparent weaknesses: 1) the counter gets reset once a day making near random content the most popular during the slow hours after midnight, and 2) the system favors content published near the reset time as the list feeds itself; people want to read content that other people have found interesting.

A partner of ours, Uusi Suomi, has been running a Wordpress MU (now called Wordpress MS) -based blogging community since 2008. The basic stuff – blogging – has worked relatively well there all the time. The use of the word “relative” instead of “great” is based on the fact that the platform was never the most up-to-date version of WPMU and much of the cool stuff that is available now was not there for Uusi Suomi.