Blast from the past:

Back in the day, one of the earliest assessments of weblogs’ popularity was available through the Beebo Metalog. A couple of days ago, Michael Stillman (the guy behind Beebo) reposted a slice of that from September 2000: Beebo! Metalog and Metalog Ratings. This site, which did exist back then, wasn’t on the list of the top 50 sites, but it was among the pool of sites that made up the rankings. Then, as now, mikel.org kept quite a low profile.