Bloggers Recall the Year in Pictures

Retrospectives are always popular this time of the year, and the blogosphere last week shared one of the first collections of the year in photos.

The No. 2 subject on blogs from December 5-9 was BuzzFeed's 45 Most Powerful Images of 2011. Largely the province of news magazines in an earlier media era, the internet-based BuzzFeed, has now moved into the scene, ranking and sharing some of the most dramatic news events of the year. The photos selected ranged from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan to students being pepper-sprayed at UC Davis, from the tornado in Joplin, Missouri to the drought in East Africa. The images were so popular they resulted in BuzzFeed's biggest traffic day ever, according to the site's founder, Jonah Peretti. A week after its posting, the page of images had been viewed almost eight million times.

The biggest referrer to the page, by far, was Facebook, which was responsible for over half of the referrals; over 4.5 million clicks came from the social networking behemoth. At a distant second was Reddit, an aggregation site where users post links and then "up vote" posts to give them higher billing on the site, referring about 253,000 people to the images. Twitter was not as much of a driver though certainly had some influence. The network referred about 191,000 visitors over the week's time and the story was tweeted about 43,000 times.