Soccer Dad

I'm #22

Earlier today I got a visitor from here. The title of the page is "Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks." For context I searched on the title and discovered that it's the name of a paper.

If I understand the paper, the blogs (or websites) listed make up a network of points that if one monitors, one would be apprised of most, if not all, important stories going through the internet.

I e-mailed one of the authors of the paper with some observations about some of those blogs that I noticed.

My name is David Gerstman and I came upon your paper on *Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks* when I saw that someone visited my blog via your list of top 100 blogs via Sitemeter.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that according to your criteria, my blog came out at 22. I was rated higher in that list than a lot of more popular blogs, so naturally I was quite pleased with that result.

There were some things I notice about your list. First of all #4 was "The Watcher of Weasels." The Watcher has a council of twelve bloggers who submit and vote on a number of blog posts every week. Each council member nominates one of his own posts and a post from another blog and the Watcher compiles two lists and each council member votes on them. Every council member also must post the winners in each category every week (and link back to the Watcher's announcement of the winners.) I do notice that through the council I cover a lot of current topics. (I don't know if this in any affects your conclusion about Fridays but the Watcher announces the winner late Thursday night/early Friday morning and a number council members post the results right away.)

There are 3 current council members on your top 100 list: me, Rhymes with Right and the Glittering Eye. There are at least two former council members in Dr. Sanity and Gates of Vienna.

Also Dr. Sanity and I run blog carnivals. These are weekly collections of blog posts devoted to certain themes.

I'm not sure how all this meshes with your algorithm, but I hope you find it somewhat helpful.

To which he responded:

This is very interesting and nicely explains why we are seeing things that we see. :) The explanation for the Friday effect is especially interesting. And by our measure early summarizers are the blogs to read, as they carry important stories soon.

The Friday effect is that if there's a best day to read blogs to maximize the information your getting, it's Friday. Whether the posting of the Watcher's Council results is enough to make a difference I don't know. But I suspect that there are more factors at work.

Here's how fellow top 100 lister Shopping Blog describes the problem the research addresses.

The math geniuses at Carnegie Mellon wanted to answer a crucial question: if you only have time to read 100 blogs to keep current with what's happening in the blogosphere, which 100 (out of the millions that are online) should you make time to read?

So this isn't about popularity but about being on top of things. Bloggers who link a lot would seem to have a decided advantage. There are, of course, plenty of top bloggers on the list, including Instapundit, Don Surber, PowerLine, Captains' Quarters, A blog for all, The Jawa Report, The Anchoress, The Volokh Conspiracy and Michelle Malkin. Nor is it only populated with right of center blogs as I noticed that Tbogg, who ranked me out earlier this week also was listed.

I suspect that bloggers who link a lot to other blogs have an advantage here as well as though who are frequently quoted. I'm not going to pretend, though, that I fully understand how the researchers came up with this list.

UPDATE: Put another way, "If you're going to waste your time reading blogs, reading these 100 blogs is the most efficient way to do it."

blogging.