The system identifies the popularity of a blog by looking at its stats and by finding links or other references to the blog from other blogs or websites. It does this by combining the ratings calculated in a few different ways: (i) it looks at all the recent posts from other bloggers to see if your blog is listed there (not in your own, sorry!) - the more your blog is linked to by others the higher your popularity; (ii) it uses the Technorati stats (which list all the blogs & websites that link to every blog that is registered there) but these don't always work brilliantly; (iii) it uses Google Page Rank; and (iv) I have a (small) list of personal favorites which are mostly very high quality designers, and particularly quality template designers (like scrapandrea.blogspot.com) which have their ratings increased because I have so little time I often don't get through each daily list myself! I have also recently implemented some code to identify when blogs link to DigiFree (e.g., as a blinkie, a blog award in a post, etc). If a blog has a link to DigiFree which is visible on the main blog page then the star rating for the blog is increased. Blogs which don't link back to DigiFree now also have their star rating capped. At this stage you either gain or lose 1 star but this might be subject to change. This is like a pay-back system.
To increase your star rating, there are a few things you can do. First of all, make sure your blog is registered at Technorati. You can do this by using their "ping" service which means you type in a link which looks like this: http://technorati.com/ping?url=digifree.blogspot.com and replace my blog URL with yours. And then claim your blog on their site. And of course, you can add DigiFree to your favs there too! ;-) Second, add a DigiFree blinkie (and make sure it actually links back to DigiFree) because this should increase your rating. The more your blog is linked to by others (e.g., if someone else says your freebies are nice on their blog post) the higher your blog's popularity will be. The more you talk about each others blogs/freebies the more this will be reflected in the popularity scores. But remember, it's always a comparison, so it's the blogs that are referenced the most whose rankings go up. E.g., you might be referenced 5 times one day but if 80% of all the other blogs listed on that same day are referenced more than this it won't actually help you.
I'm also currently looking into writing two more indicators for increasing star rating: (i) Alexa rankings; and (ii) for those who have DigiFree listed as a favorite on Technorati.
