From a press release about a study called Traffic Characteristics and Communication Patterns in the blogosphere [LATER: Try this pdf file if that link doesn’t work.] by researchers at Boston University and Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil:

The study concludes that the intensity of traffic directed to a blog through search engines (which use traditional page-rank algorithms) does not seem to correlate with the “real” popularity of the blog, and suggests that social-network-based navigation may be playing an increasingly important role in web navigation in general, and blogosphere navigation in particular. On that count the authors note that in blogspace, the popularity of a blog is more a reflection of its owner’s social attributes (e.g., celebrity status, reputation, and public image) than a reflection of the number and rank of other blogs or web pages that point to it. This highlights the need for the development of page-rank algorithms that take into consideration the social attributes of blogosphere actors (as opposed to solely on the topology of the underlying blogspace), possibly using inference techniques.

Professors Azer Bestavros (BU), Virgilio Almeida, Jussara Almeida and the graduate students Fernando Duarte and Bernado Matos (UFMG) used an extensive set of real traces to characterize the access patterns to a popular blogosphere. The traces consist of over 32 million blog requests and about 278 thousand comment requests. These requests were made by over 4 million visitors over a period of four weeks.

I haven’t read the study — I’m about to get on a plane from Helsinki, where, by the way, I had a wonderful time but slept like a dog on a rocking chair (assuming dogs don’t sleep well on rocking chairs) — and the summary raises lots of questions that I’m sure the study itself addresses. Anyway, it sounds like an interesting study. Hence, this premature post. [Tags: blogs ]

Categories: blogs dw