Monitoring Blogs to Catch the Important Stories: Which 100 Blogs Would You Have to Watch?

If you were monitoring a network of water pipes supplying water to various areas, and are worried about an outbreak of water-borne disease, you can monitor the spread of this disease by placing sensors at important junctions and pipes (instead of monitoring every single pipe).

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University used this approach to answer the question "Which blogs should I read to be most up-to-date with important stories?"

They took data from 45,000 blogs and 10 million posts over one year (2006) and tracked 1 million links from blogs to blogs to see how information spread, and to determine which blogs were at the most important junctures, therefore worth reading.

They came up with a list of 100 blogs - some of the blogs listed make sense (like Boing Boing, metafilter, TUAW, and so on) but others really don't: donsurber.blogspot.com? He's not even in the top 100,000 of Technorati but is listed as #2 on the list. Anglican.tk? That's just a spam blog, guys!

Some that should be on the list weren't: Engadget, the world's top ranked blog by technorati isn't there, neither is gizmodo, the second ranked blog. Where's Huffington Post? If you include reddit as a blog to watch, then where is digg?

A big flaw in the paper (which I didn't read carefully) is the presumption that there is a single blogosphere where in fact there are networks of blogs that don't actually link to one another. You'd expect political blogs, which dominate this list, to link to other political blogs, but not to technology blogs. Which "blogosphere" you end up monitoring depends on which blog you pick first.

Link - via New Scientist Technology Blog

And no, Neatorama wasn't on it - the researchers are correct on this count because Neatorama doesn't cover important stories, only interesting ones ;)


Dear Natorama:

"Anglican.tk? That’s just a spam blog, guys!"

Actually, it's the former site of CaNN: Classical Anglican Net News-- a very popular Christian News & Commentary site. We've moved to:

http://webelf.wordpress.com/

Some idiot then pirated the .tk url, which we've been trying to re-establish.

Cheers,

Binks
CaNN/Anglican.tk/ Webelf Report
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Don Surber's blog is very good, but I quit visiting when he switched to using one or two sentences on the front page, with a "Click here to read more" button. That shit is highly annoying. But he gets linked to from lots of blogs that I do read every day.
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Um, "important" to whom?

I read different blogs on different days, depending on what's happening in the world. Some days economics is important, some days politics is, some days it's fun stuff like Neatorama, some days it's catching up with my blog friends.

Important is a very loaded term.
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Don Surber was last seen excoriating that poor kid Graeme Frost for receiving health care subsidized by public funds.

Oh yeah, we're winning in Iraq, too! Baghdad is safer than Paris!
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@ ted #2: You get grouchyoitis, a common disease amongst commenters on blogs. :)

@ Binks #3: ouch, that sucks! I assume the domain registration expired and wasn't renewed in time ... I don't even know what remedy you can have b/c most registrars have a grace period where the original owner can re-register the domain name after its terms is up, but if you fail to do that, then it's fair game for anyone (including spammers) to register the name.

@skh.pcola #4: the list is skewed toward blogs that have lots of links but little content otherwise. Like instapundit and now Don Surber's blog.

@donna #5: "important" is my word, not theirs. The premise of their paper is that they did this analysis, which shows that if you read the blogs on their list (either top 21, top 100, or top 5000) then you're most likely to get exposed to more stories floating around on the blogosphere than if you were to only read Technorati's top 100 blogs. (see chart on their page which shows information captured vs. no of blogs read).

They claimed to be able to vacuum up more than 60% of all stories floating on the web by reading just the 100 blogs they listed. In comparison, by reading the Technorati Top 100 (which is ranked by in-links), you only "get" about 45% of the stories on the blogosphere.
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I think they rely too much on algorythms and links in and out, and too little on actual content. If I were compiling such a list by my gut (and I monitor the internet for a living), I would divide the subjects more evenly. This has too much repetition in politics and not enough arts and literature, technology, education, religion, entertainment news, science, and international news. I would also select blogs with more content. For example, HuffPo and Daily Kos have tons of authors and content, those would cover left~wing politics by themselves. I'm sure you could find high~content blogs for right~wing politics and other subjects that would do the same. Science Blogs is good for that reason, but its not all~inclusive; there should be more science outlets.

Another caveat: I'm not familiar with all of these. If they'd posted the name of the blogs instead of just the URL, I might find it easier to understand.
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I just realized that my webpage is the first result in google when you type in "the warehouse" - so I was pretty jazzed about that. As far as news blogs go I just skim Fark (which is far more informative than watching any news program). News stresses me out. I can't handle most of it.
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