Don’t get me wrong; I’m certainly happy to be included, just as I’m happy to be in Who’s Who, and the like. And having assembled lists of academic bloggers myself, I know someone had to put a bit of work into writing out the list. But the commercial nature of the list makes it suspect: or it least it would if those on the list didn’t seem to endorse it.

And I’m not against awards or top X lists. I’ve made the point before that indicating the good stuff is a worthwhile venture. It’s just that this serves as an example of when peer review can get to be a bit self-serving. I actually read a bunch of these blogs, and they are good stuff. Heck, most of them were on the Crooked Timber blogroll before they did some recent paring, and no one complained about that. So what’s the problem?

Maybe it’s a question of method. No one voted. There is no citation analysis. (Actually, it might be interesting to run this against Technorati. Or maybe create an index from this list that included who they linked most heavily.)

Overall, I get this uneasy feeling that this case says something about how online trust works, including in places like Wikipedia and in major journals. I’m not sure what it says, exactly. I certainly wouldn’t suggest that any one of the blogs on that list doesn’t deserve to be there. But it makes me a bit uneasy in a non-specified way. Maybe it’s no more than the suspicion that they are wheezing the Googlejuice.

This workshop aims to develop and bring together a community of researchers interested in discussing the manifold challenges and potentials of knowledge acquisition from the social web.

With the advent of the “Social Web”, a new breed of web applications has enriched the social dimension of the web. On the social web, actors can be understood as social agents – technological or human entities – that collaborate, pursue goals, are autonomous, and are capable of exhibiting flexible problem solving and social behavior. By participating in the social web, both technological and human agents leave complex traces of social interactions and their motivations behind, which can be studied, analyzed and utilized for a range of different purposes. The broad availability and open accessibility of these traces in social web corpora, such as in del.icio.us, Wikipedia, weblogs and others, provides researchers with opportunities for, for example, novel knowledge acquisition techniques and strategies, as well as large scale, empirically coupled “in the field” studies of social processes and structures.

This workshop aims to develop and bring together a diverse community of researchers interested in the social web by seeking submissions that are focusing on understanding and evaluating the role of agents, goals, structures, concepts, context, knowledge and social interactions in a broad range of social web applications. Examples for such applications include, but are not limited to social authoring (e.g. wikis, weblogs), social sharing (e.g. del.icio.us, flickr), social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) and social searching (e.g. wikia, eurekster, mahalo) applications.

Deadline has been extended to May 16. Hopefully folks will blog it!
(via Anjo)

The Dallas Mavericks have banned from the locker room any writer whose “primary purpose is to blog.” The problem is that this rule has been applied to only a single journalist, a blogger for the Dallas Morning News, who happened to also write an article critical of the coach the day he was booted from the locker room.

But Cuban defends his decision in a post that seems contradictory, to say the least. He starts out by saying:

A blogger, a beat writer, a columnists. The medium they use to deliver their content should be irrelevant. No question about it.

Right so far. The job of journalist has very little to do with where your story hits, and a lot more to do with the ways in which you gather it. If you are committing journalism, it doesn’t matter where you are doing it.

By the end of the same post, he not only has a question about it, he has completely contradicted himself:

Do they not know the difference between a blogger and someone who actually writes feature articles on a destination website?

Obviously, no they don’t. Unfortunately, he fails to explain the difference. I suppose he is suggesting that he will only allow people in the locker room who have a certain audience. By that measure, Howard Stearn gets a pass, for example. It seems pretty obvious that they limit access to the locker room to those who are full-time journalists, and probably not every full-time journalist who wants access gets it. The whole “blogging” think is a red herring.

As LAist points out, Cuban seems pretty clueless about the media environment, suggesting that if he lets one blogger in, every high schooler with a MySpace page will want to crowd into the locker room.

The banned journalist, Tim MacMahon, posts his own response, and once again showing Cuban’s perfidies (or at least churlishness) on the issue, brings up Cuban’s own argument against walled gardens expressed less that two years ago (during a talk in which he suggested that Google would be stupid to buy YouTube).

The question remains, though, how professional sports survives without the walled garden. Really, it remains the test case. Cuban, as with all owners, is in the business of selling first, the spectacle, and second, the brand. The only way to price out spectacles is to be exclusionary. But it’s also the best way to become irrelevant in a media environment rich with alternatives.

(via Aaron)

Unfortunately, it looks like they are deciding who to award it to based on the inherently flawed internet poll. Not only is the willingness to vote a bad indicator of real popularity (if popularity, rather than quality, is their major criterion), let alone quality, but there is far too much opportunity for fraud. Not that I am impugning any of the finalists, only indicating that it’s a bad way to judge things. Right now, for example, the number of votes cast for each blog has no relationship to the Technorati ranking or PageRank, which suggests something is fishy. Moreover, it’s clear that more popular topics are going to win out over more academic topics in broad popularity.

But, who am I to complain, since I encourage my students to court an audience. Good luck to Kevin, and to the other entrants. And bravo to Collegescholarships.org for offering money to student bloggers. Yes, it’s a commercial for them, but this is marketing I can get behind.

That doesn’t quite explain why I’m blocked by major filters. The rating changes depending on what is on the main page. I have a feeling that if it slurped up my archives, it would get a different rating, but even my cyberporn category only gets us down to an R. I’m not sure that a blog that fails to reach NC-17 is really playing to its full potential. (via Froomkin)

Huberman notes that not only are the surfing patterns of the web regular, the structure of the web itself exhibits a number of regularities, particularly in its distribution of features. The normal distribution of features found everywhere–the bell-shaped curve we are familiar with–is also found on the web, but for a number of features, the web demonstrates a “power law” distribution. George Kingsley Zipf described a similar sort of power law distribution (Zipf’s Law) among words in the English language, showing that the most frequently used English word (“the”) appears far more often than the second-most frequently used word (“a”), which appears far more often than the third-ranked word, and so on (Yes, yes, I know: Zipf is ranks and so it’s different, but not different enough to matter for this discussion.) This distribution–magnitude inversely proportionate to rank–has shown up in a number of places, from the size of earthquakes to city populations.

The number of “backlinks,” hyperlinks leading to a given page on the web, provides an example of such a distribution. If the number of backlinks were distributed normally, we would expect for there to be a large number of sites that had an average number of backlinks, and a relatively small number of sites that had very many or very few backlinks. For example, if the average page on the web has 2.1 backlinks, we might expect that a very large number of pages have about two backlinks, and a relatively small number to have one or zero backlinks. In practice, a very large number of pages have only a single backlinks, a much smaller number of two backlinks, and an again much smaller number have three backlinks. The average is as high as 2.1 because of the small number of sites that attract many millions of backlinks each. Were human height distributed in a similar fashion, with an average height of, say, 2.1 meters, we would find most of the globeâ€s population stood under a meter tall, except for a handful of giants who looked down at us from thousands of kilometers in the sky.

Huberman notes that this distribution is “scale-free”; that is, the general nature of the distribution looks the same whether you are examining the entire World Wide Web, or just a small subset of pages. I have been blogging for several years, and each blog entry ends up on its own page, often called a “permalink.” I took a look at the last 1,500 of my posts, to see how many backlinks each one received. The first figure to the right shows a ranked distribution of incoming links, not including the first-ranked posting. The vast majority (1,372) of these 1,500 pages do not have any incoming links at all. Despite this, the average number of backlinks (=”inlinks” in the figure) is 0.9, driven upward by the top-ranked posts. Incidentally, as the second graph shows, the number of comments on each of these entries follows a similar distribution, with a very large number of posts (882) receiving either a single comment or none at all. In order to make these figures more legible, I have omitted the most popular post, entitled “How to Cheat Good,” which was the target of 435 backlinks by August of 2007, and had collected 264 comments.

One reason to explain why such a distribution exists is to assume that there were a few pages at the beginning of the web, in the early 1990s, and each year these sites have grown by a certain percentage. Since the number of pages that were created has increased each year, we would assume that these older sites would have accumulated more links over time. Such an explanation is as unlikely on the web as it is among humans. We do not grow more popular with every year that passes; indeed, youth often garners more attention than age. There are pages that are established and quickly become “hits,” linked to from around the web. While it cannot explain the initial rise in popularity, many of these sites gain new backlinks because they have already received a large number of backlinks. Because of the structure of the web, and the normal browsing patterns, highly linked pages are likely to attract ever more links, a characteristic Huberman refers to as “preferential attachment.”

Take, for example, my most popular recent posting. The earliest comments and links came from friends and others who might regularly browse my blog. Some of those people linked to the site in their own blogs. Eventually, it came to the attention of several widely read and popular blogs, including Michael Froomkin’s “Discourse.net” and Bruce Schneier’s “Schneier on Security.” Someone noticed it on the latter blog, and a link was posted to it from “Boing Boing,” a very popular site with millions of readers. Naturally, many people saw it on Boing Boing and linked to it as well, from their blogs and gradually from other web sites. Eventually, I received emails telling me that the page had been cited in a European newspaper, and that a printed version of the posting had been distributed to a university department’s faculty.

It is impossible for me or anyone else to guess why this particular posting became especially popular, but every page on the web that becomes popular relies at least in part on its popularity for this to happen. The exact mechanism is unclear, but after some level of success, it appears that popularity in networked environments becomes “catching.” The language of epidemiology is intentional. Just as social networks transmit diseases, they can also transmit ideas, and the structures that support that distribution seem to be in many ways homologous.

More of the Same

As with every new system or innovation encountered on “the internets,” a common claim about blogging is “it’s all been done before.” I kept a blog before they were called blogs: a frequently updated website, an email newsletter, a periodically downloadable file on “the Source,” an early ISP. And before that there was Plato. Isn’t blogging just BBS software / forums in new bottles? How is the blogosphere substantially different from Usenet? These questions are both inevitable and valid. Too often we thrill to the idea of the latest incarnation of the “virtual community,” and are quite willfully able to forget the hyperbole surrounding earlier technologies. And it is difficult not to recognize the kind of buzz around blogging as similar to these earlier collaborative technologies.

I think blogging has a simple answer to this: none of these other technologies captured the public imagination in the same way that blogging has, nor the same number of users. Sure, there are more who use email, brows the web, or communicate via IM, but these are not really the same special type of large-scale discussion technologies that blogs embody. I think that when future historians look back at the earliest years of this century, two of the things that will show up in the history books will be the mass adoption of blogs and wikipedia. I don’t think that these are the most important innovations of the last few years, but I do think that they will have some of the most important social impact. So part of the answer to that question is simply one of size. Usenet, even at its peak, did not (I believe) have a million people writing, and ten times that reading. We don’t have to fall back on hyperbole: if the story of blogging ended today and no one ever blogged again — and I although I don’t think we’ve seen the peak of public blogging, I would not be shocked if this were the case — we would still have to acknowledge this as one of the most widespread examples of user-produced media, and something worth understanding.

But really what people are suggesting when they say this is that the principles that we have already discovered in earlier examples of computer mediated communication are just being repeated in another form in blogs. One answer to that is “yes, but to a greater degree.” That is, there are more people doing it, as argued above. Or, the impediments to presenting to the web have been reduced further, so that creating and maintaining a web page is even easier than it has been in the past, and has been reduced to some critical level at which there are compounding returns. But this “more” change is not something that should be dismissed out of hand. On the other hand, there are some elements of the blogosphere that I think are, if not unique, especially important. Some of these are reflected in the neologisms and specialized services that have arisen to support blogging.

New words for new ways

One of the ways to identify what makes weblogs special is by noting some of the specialized jargon that has grown up around blogging. Unfortunately the proliferation of these terms have made entry into blogging more daunting in some ways. But they also indicate new ideas or techniques that need to be named because they don’t fit well into previous paradigms. Among these:

Trackbacks, pingbacks, reciprolinks, blogrolls.

RSS, aggregators.

del.icio.us, technorati, blogdex, furl.

The blogging factors

What, then, are the salient differences, the principle components of blogging, that we should be concerned with?

Ridiculously easy publishing.

Forging public voices.

Conviviality, conversation, deliberation?

Planned serendipity. While improving the ability to search is an important need on the web, improving our ability to stumble usefully is also important.

The return of a workable push media: now with more mods.

Convergence of exchanged data, personal server. Todo: Onfolio

Ubiquitous media.

Future

No one is good at predicting the future of communication technology; there are just too many variables. That said, a prediction of the future state of technology is really just another way of saying that you have a good feel for what is important in today’s technology. Neal Stephenson claimed that books like Snow Crash were intentionally placed in the now. The degree to which they seem to be prophetic is directly related to how well they discern the contours of the present. So the future of blogging is “more of the same” where “the same” refers to those elements of blogging that are important or unusual. If the list above is correct, we can expect innovations to continue to develop along the lines they already have.

The barriers to entry, and complexity of the process of blogging will be reduced. I suspect we will see WYSIWYG blogging software within the next year, at the outside. When you want to add or edit a message, you click on it and start typing. The RSS of anything that might ever change is already providing a way of quickly making semantic connections that allow for other kinds of rapid updates, and I suspect that this will continue. We are all blogging with kludges for blog software at the moment, and many of the ways that this needs to improve are already clear.

There will continue to be a place for small and large public voices, but I suspect we will see some serious changes in the way some organizations do business, such that they can make use of the transparency that blogging provides. This will have a real effect on how we think about privacy and how we think about who we are. The transparent and networked nature of our public identities is, I believe, reversing some of the the century-long opinions about the nature of personal identity/psyche and the networked (or urban) society. It was assumed that we would increasingly become divided into multiple selves in service to a number of non-overlapping groups. Unlike in the traditional village, the people we work and play with often do not know each other, and they each know a different form of “you.” This leads to something that appears to be akin to multiple personalities, and the purposive construction of new identities for different kinds of interactions. But the transparency that blogging seems to encourage may mean a reversal, or at the very least a complication, of this process. The identity that appears in my blog is one that looks the same to my wife, my students, my doctor, my boss, my mother, and my colleagues around the world. Maintaining any multiple identities I might have becomes far more difficult with my social circles become enmeshed together.

We can at least hope that those newly public voices will also lead to new kinds of discussion, deliberation, and conviviality. I must admit that I am particularly suspicious of this. I suspect that very little gets done in blogs, and that there is not a good framework for distributed conversations. This may change, but at present, the kinds of conversations that occur on blogs feel somehow asymmetric. I have talked about this before, on this blog and in conversations: many bloggers are the inverse of lurkers: they are “mumblers.” Lurkers read without revealing themselves to the authors. Mumblers write without knowing if there is an audience. Mumbling is good for public discourse, I think, but it may not be as good for discussion and deliberation.

While they may not host collaborations, they might enable them. The discussions that do occur on blogs tend to be a little like the pheromone trails that ants leave. Those trails may not, in themselves, represent any form of useful structure. However, they form the support infrastructure that allows for large-scale collaboration. By providing some form of transparent “contrail” on the web of your work, your interests, your ideas, your social networks, you allow for the intersection of such paths. As a bunch of ants wandering around exploring the intellectual space of our world, the likelihood that our trajectories will ever lead to a useful collision is relatively small. But this increases many-fold when we leave behind bread crumbs for others to stubble upon.

I think people are coming to understand this process of encountering trails. You see this a bit in investigations of knowledge management in the real world. More and more, people are abandoning the idea that you can download expertise into a system. If you could do that (and you can’t), you wouldn’t really need the people in an organization. Instead, you need to build tools that enhance the process of leaving a trail, so that when people don’t know what they are looking for, they know who does.

That last one is an interesting one. Last year, a California court ruled that AppleInsider didn’t have to release the source of a leak to Apple. Wonder if this changes things. What it doesn’t change is the recognition that bloggers are–from the perspective of the law, if not from newpapermen–journalists, and that a journalists’ privilege, such as it is, should extend to them.

Blogging has diffused rapidly over the last several years in the United States, but that diffusion has not occurred evenly. In examining the distribution of 191,294 weblogs sampled in November 2003, we find that while blogging enjoys popularity throughout the U.S., bloggers appear more frequently within particular cities. This project indexes American bloggers by three-digit zip codes corresponding to their location, and identifies the demographic factors that appear to encourage blogging. We find that cities with populations that are young, urban, and more tolerant of difference are likely to host more bloggers.

I told them what I tell everyone: you must let go. Use the force, do not try to control it. The message that you should nurture a public image rather than attempt to control the discourse tends not to sit well with PR folks. Along with a number of problems (bad speech, bad room, tech difficulties, time issues), all but a small handful of the people in the room dismissed my talk out of hand. It didn’t help that I criticized an effort at play currently at SUNY New Paltz and elsewhere to create what might uncharitably be called “fake blogs.” The effort to create “blog-like” sites that do not take on the ethos of blogging is, in my opinion, doomed to fail. Or, to put it in the words of a group of students I talked to about a similar “official” university student blog, if there aren’t pictures of people drunk or complaints about parking, it’s not really a student blog.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed is running a story about another approach. Realizing that students no longer pay much attention to broadcast email (nor do some faculty, I should admit), some are experimenting with other means of communication. Harcum College, for example, has established a MySpace page as a sort of official/unofficial channel of communication. As hard as I pushed, UB was not willing to offer RSS feeds of their information, and Quinnipiac seems even more interested in controlling the public message. As a result, it’s not possible to have an official Quinnipiac site that, for example, demonstrates what interactive communication really is. It’s great to see an institution willing to take the chance of engaging this new medium.

An article in the Wall Street Journal likewise looks at a congressman’s attempts at using MySpace and Facebook to promote his campaign.

What is a little odd about these is the idea that email and official sites are fine, but that there is a very important place for informal communication online, and if an organization is missing that, they are missing a lot. The failure of many has been the mistaken view that one’s image will be sullied by communicating informally with customers, clients, employees, constituents, voters, and students. On the contrary, those who are literate users of the new social technologies expect you to communicate through these informal networked technologies. If you don’t someone else will. While you cannot control the message in these channels, you certainly can influence it–it shouldn’t be all or nothing.

It’s interesting because it has grown up largely outside of the blogging phenomenon. It’s a bit like LiveJournal in this respect, but to an even more extreme degree. Paul made the site in response to the needs and the interests of the community, and as a result, it feels a lot like other blogs in some ways, and not at all in others. Judged on its own merits, it is a striking design, and has a very rich feature set. Particularly for community-based journalism/journaling, which has always been at the heart of the project, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a better platform.

But it is also interesting in the ways in which it integrates with the physical community–a section just north of downtown Buffalo surrounding Elmwood Boulevard Avenue–but manages not to integrate much with other blogs. Certainly, there are links to it from other prominent blogs in Buffalo, and it is widely read by bloggers in the area, but it has somehow managed–largely by design–to be a very place-based community website, and for that reason, among others, a particularly interesting collaborative community. Paul did a lot to publicize the site, but none of it was virtual publicity. Mostly, he linked to the site from the physical location: the side of his house, chalking the sidewalk, or t-shirts on people.

Scholars who blog are engaging in more than personal publishing; they are shaping a new “third place” for academic discourse, a space for developing the social networks that help drive the more visible institutions of research. The number of blogging scholars and the novelty of the medium mean that what blogging is and how it relates to being a scholar in the networked age remains unresolved, but the inchoate informal networks of blogging scholars that exist today already hint at the potential of the practice.

New technologies inevitably draw on earlier models to make sense of how they should be used, and to offset the potential social disequilibrium brought about by the technology . We are in the midst of a quiet, uneven revolution in academic discourse, and blogging and other forms of social computing make up an important part of that revolution. We may filter our view of blogging through a set of archetypal scholarly communication settings: the notebook, the coffee house, and the editorial page. For now, scholarly blogs are a bit of each of these, while they are in the process of becoming something that will be equally familiar, but wholly new.

Bias of Blogging

As noted in earlier chapters, so varied are the behaviors of bloggers that it is a bit surprising that the same term is used to cover them all. Nonetheless, there are four themes that seem to form a core set of practices and beliefs among many bloggers. First, blogs rely on networked audiences that may share little in common except for being regular or irregular readers of a particular site. Mass media act to collect audiences and aggregate opinion and attention, blogs encourage individualized views of the informational world.

A second hallmark of blogging is that it encourages conversation. Often commentators have focused on so-called “A-list” blogs which many not value exchange as highly. Other bloggers might be classified as “mumblers”: without obvious comments or readers. Even in these cases, though, it seems that bloggers are seeking a way of conversing with the world.

Third, blogging is a low intensity activity. Producing microcontent requires little commitment of time, and free blogging platforms provide an inexpensive outlet for this microcontent.

Finally, blogs represent a relatively transparent and unedited view of thinking-in-progress.

While there are examples of websites using blogging software that do not exhibit all four characteristics, they are accepted broadly enough to constitute a bias of the medium, a tendency of practice. It is not difficult to find antecedents to these overall themes in both the history of hacking and of scholarship—two cultures that share significant common ground . A decade ago Harrison and Stephen explained that computer networking was of such interest to academics. It played to long held ideals among scholars that had yet to be realized: “unending and inclusive scholarly conversation; collaborative inquiry limited only by mutual interests; unrestrained access to scholarly resources; independent, decentralized learning; and a timely and universally accessible system for representing, distributing, and archiving knowledge” . Blogs, while not addressing all of these ideals, have already shown themselves to be effective in ways that other, centrally-organized efforts at scholarly networking have not.

[To read more, you’ll have to buy the book…]

I’ve been playing with this for a couple of days now, and it works like a charm. Simple, usable, and very functional. I’ve learned my lesson, and rather than writing a scraper, requested that the creator include RSS feeds. Not necessary for most people, I suspect, but I have been gradually trying to collect life indicators via RSS.

* It was on a DC area AM talk station.
* It was early in the morning on a Saturday, when most of the party animals that read this blog are just going to sleep, some returning home after the hunt in order to avoid the disasterous health effects of sunrise.
* It was on a station that has a book club reading Ann Coulter right now. Seriously! Check out the web site. Is it just me or is that the equivalent of liberals having a book club to read Mad Magazine?

But Rick Fowler asked some interesting questions. Like always, I sound goofy to myself, but that’s the way it goes. Here’s the seven minute recording: MP3 (1.6 MB).

Alexander Halavais, may only be an assistant professor of interactive communications at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, but he knows how to deliver the money quote. Asked about bloggers by the Washington Post, Halavais came up with a beaut.

“The average blogger is a 14-year-old girl writing about her cat,” Halavais said.

Leaving aside the “only” (is that because of the assistant prof thing?), there is only one problem with this. I’m not entirely sure whether I am the source, or if I was paraphrasing something from Perseus. I talked to a reporter, Kim Hart, with the Washington Post yesterday, and in her story, she has me saying it:

“The average blogger is a 14-year-old girl writing about her cat,” said Alexander Halavais, an assistant professor of interactive communications at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

Trick is, I thought I was quoting a something from Perseus, and told her I’d email her the cite. The closest I could come up with is this from Perseus’s press release (the site seems to be down, so it’s from the Google cache):

Blogging is many things, yet the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life. It will be written very informally (often in “unicase”: long stretches of lowercase with ALL CAPS used for emphasis) with slang spellings, yet will not be as informal as instant messaging conversations (which are riddled with typos and abbreviations). Underneath the iceberg, blogging is a social phenomenon: persistent messaging for young adults.

And some googling fails to come up with anything about cats and 14-year-olds. So I guess I really did say it. I distinctly remember saying it at the MEA conference talk back in–what–2005? So it must have been that I just remembered myself saying it. Deja vu all over again.

8% write blogs

Pew’s report, Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers, starts out by noting that while blog writers may skew young, they are demographically diverse. They update previous numbers, indicating that 8% of internet users in the US blog, and 39% (or about 57 million adults) read blogs.

Not surprising to many bloggers, I suspect, they found that the most popular topics in the long tail of blogging are individuals’ lives and experiences. This was the topic of 37% of blogs. (I suspect that it is also the topic of this blog!) This was followed by relatively small numbers who blogged about entertainment, sports, current events, business, technology religion, or health. They generally spend an hour or two on their blogs each week, and do not think of it as a central part of their lives.

But why?

They keep blogs largely for a variety of reasons, and I found this part of the report particularly interesting. A few things of note here:

* The most popular major reason for keeping a blog was creative expression and sharing a document of your life. Half of bloggers saw this as the major reason for blogging, and 78% were driven by personal experiences to blog.

* A large proportion saw blogging as a way to stay in touch with friends or family (37% major reason), or network and meet new people (34% minor reason).

* Only 15% thought of it as a way of making money.

* Of particular interest to some of the work I’m doing now, 34% saw “sharing practical knowledge or skills” as a major reason for blogging, and 30% found it a minor reason.

Interestingly, over-30 bloggers tend to have one-topic blogs, while younger bloggers are a bit of everything. When people ask me how to have a popular blog, I generally tell them to narrowly specialize. I wonder if this is a genre bias of us old folks. I mean, it may just be that wide-audience blogs need to be topically narrow, but it may also be that this is true mainly because of our assumptions about media.

One third of bloggers say they post for their audience, but most say they post for themselves. This particular question is a bit difficult, I suspect. There is a natural (defensive?) tendency to say “Oh, I just do this for me.” Sure, there is a balance there, but even though, for example, I do not blog primarily to drive an audience–if I did, I would stick to items that get the most hits/links, like building rafts, political rants, and the like–it is also true that I am blogging for you, my assumed audience, in some way. I think this is reflected by how many bloggers track their audience, and know who they are. (Despite more than half of the surveyed bloggers blogging pseudonymously, more than half knew that their families read their blogs, for example.)

Also, 9% say they have had their blogs mentioned by news media, a number the authors suggest is small, but I find to be impossibly large. The question they asked was

Skewed young, urban, non-white

54% of bloggers are under the age of 30, and are more likely than the average internet user to live in an urban area. We found that blogs, in terms of raw numbers, were far more likely to be in urban than suburban areas in the early 00s, but this survey suggests that the majority of bloggers, like the majority of internet users, tend to be in the suburbs. This might suggest a gradual hollowing out of blogging, though that might be too much to draw from such very different ways of measuring this.

They found, surprisingly, that the blogosphere is only 60% white, and evenly divided among men and women. This probably runs counter to the intuitions of many bloggers, who assume the blogosphere is a white man thing. (An intuition that is supported by Wei’s recent survey of blog commenters, and perhaps demonstrates the limitations of that study.) I suspect that this again is an issue of too much attention being paid to A-listers.

But wait, there’s more

I encourage you to read through the full report, and not just the executive summary (which is bound to be what gets spread around). There’s some great info in there about journalistic practices, blog tools (less than half have a blogroll, very few know if they even have an RSS feed), non-text posting (30% have posted audio!), and news-seeking.

There were some things I wished they had asked. For example: of all those bloggers getting their news from newspapers (the majority, surprising because of the youth of the group), how many actually read it on paper?

“In the physical world, it’s a matter of taking the three-dimensional world and making it two-dimensional,” said Mr. Dodge. But on the Internet, he said, there are more dimensions to consider.

With all deference to Dodge, who is a genius, of course, I’m pretty sure that quote was from me. In fact, Matthew Hurst came back and noted that my comment (that there were tens or hundreds of thousands of dimensions) was an under-estimate, since there were as many dimensions as vertices.

In practice, since I rarely deal with data sets the size Hurst deals with, I am working in tens or hundreds of thousands of dimensions. Moreover, although I didn’t respond to his critique, the number of vertices represents an upper limit of the number of dimensions present, and given the sparse linkages on the web, it is an upper limit that is rarely approached, I suspect.

What that large number of dimensions means in practical terms is that maps like those on the Chronicle site, while they may get the “big picture” right (in terms of clustering, for example), are in some large part arbitrary. That is to say, there are millions of other maps that would represent the space equally as well.

Not enough to kill my work: I have a few more tricks that might be interesting. But a cool application. And kudos go to them for opening up the API right off the bat: lots of interesting things that could be mixed with that data.

Most recently, I got a lot of hits and comments on my post about How to Cheat Good, due in large part to nods from bloggers with serious followings: Michael Froomkin and Bruce Schneier. Thanks to the search terms people use, a lot of folks end up at an entry on Really Sexy Sindication or, strangely, How to Build a Raft.

But by far the most read and commented-on post was the Isuzu Experiment, in which I messed with Wikipedia in the name of science (or something). It’s been widely referenced and cited, though I did it just on a lark. And that gets back to Kevin’s question. Whether or not something is popular on my site is really not something I think much about any more. When something hits, I usually have no idea why, and certainly don’t predict it (otherwise I would spellcheck!). But while I don’t seek out larger audiences, I do note that when I write about my research, it often sinks like a stone: no comments, no interest. So, whether or not I consciously plan it, I tend to write more about my teaching and about politics–since these tend to garner more interest. I’ll have more to say about this in a few weeks, I suspect.

Anyway, how did I come to write that post? Well, I think I spell it out in outline form in the post itself. I was following a conversation among bloggers about a particular newspaper article, and someone actually suggested something along the lines of “someone should try…” Having always been a sucker for “someone should try…” (thus, the post you are reading now) I figured it would take only a few minutes to give it a run and type up the results. I nearly forgot about it, as I was busy with other things, but came back to a flood of emails, IMs and comments.

Ironically, I try not to blog about a lot of stuff that shows up on Boing Boing, or on Slashdot, etc. I figure, they are already doing a great job at that, why add yet another “this is cool” to the cacophony of similar posts out there. Sure, I still do it sometimes, but not often. Paradoxically, if I wanted to increase my readership, I suspect I could do so by posting mainly about news that has already been put out there.

One of you with deeper pockets than I have should go and blog it.

Here are some results of a survey of 2,020 Chinese bloggers; the sampling methodology is unspecified, so please hold that grain of salt.

* 26.2% started between 6 months to one year ago; 34.6% started between 3 months to 6 months ago; 28.7% started within the last 3 months.

* 58.8% only only one blog; 41.2% own two or more blogs.

* 83.3% hope to increase their Internet fame by blogging

* 85.9% hope to gain economic benefits by blogging

The business model of blog service providers includes: subscription fees, content publishing, advertising, moblog, enterprise applications, etc.

* 63.4% of bloggers are willing to pay the BSP for better service (note: most BSPs provide free blogs at present)

* 72.7% accept the economic benefits from the blogs

* 37.1% are willing to accept commercial ads

* 32.8% are willing to accept public service ads

* 24.0% are willing to accept any ads from anyone

* Of those who are willing to accept ads, 61.9% are willing to split the income with the BSP

* 6.1% refuse to accept any ads

* 30% said that their blogs have already brought them economic benefits

(Thanks to Ying Jiang at Adelaide for the pointer, via the Chinese Internet Research list.)

The last time I pulled from weblogs.com, it worked pretty well. Basically, I am working with a couple of other people to content analyze a relatively representative sample of weblogs. So, if I gather all the pings from a week from weblogs.com, and pull random blogs from that, I should have a decent sample. I have a couple of restrictions: that it be apparently single-author, that it be written primarily in English, and that it not be primarily commercial in purpose. This necessitates sifting through the sample by hand, and I’m doing this 100 blogs at a time.

I was prepared for the number of splogs (spam blogs). It doesn’t take much to notice that spam has infested the blogosphere. I was less prepared for the number of Asian-language blogs, particularly Chinese.

I kept an informal count of the last 100 I looked at. Of these, only 23 met the requirements I laid out above. 44 were splogs, 20 were written primarily in Chinese, and 12 in another language (four in Japanese, a couple in Thai, a couple in Farsi, one Russian, one Portuguese, and two in Spanish). I think it would be a mistake to extend this and suggest that 20% of the blogosphere is Chinese, but from an informal, personal perspective, the increase in Chinese-language bloggers is striking.

The Washington Post is running a few short articles on edublogging: an overview titled Blackboard Blogging, an article about the illustrious Will Richardson, a sidebar from Jessica, who is helping me out this semester, and an interviewlet with me.

UPDATE: zefrank makes fun of Jessica’s piece in his “das truth” (mov). She’s taking it hard, but I think it’s pretty damn funny. Nobody makes fun of me. I am chronically underlampooned, for no discernable reason, since I seem to be such an obvious target.