Thanks to Peter Gloor for pointing me to a very nice scientific discussion of how new concepts spread out through blogs, and how to find blogs that matter. Information Diffusion through Blogspace is co-authored by David Gruhl, R. Guha, Liben-Nowell, and Andrew Tomkins. The authors provide several themes. They look at the flow of log posts about specific topics. And they examine individual behavior in blogging.
They conclude that Blog topics generally follow an ongoing “chatter” that is interrupted by spikes caused by world events. They break topics into three groups. Those that are mostly ongoing chatter (e.g. Alzehaimer’s), those that are mostly inactive and then spring to life in spikes (e.g., Chibi), and those that are both high chatter and influenced by spikes (e.g., Microsoft). Most spikes last 5 – 10 days. These seem intuitively obvious but then research often proves the intuitive and they do provide a way to analysis these trends and categorize topics.
They also look at where individuals’ posts fall in the flow of topics. They categorize these individuals who tend to post in the ramp-up, mid-high, or ramp-down flow of a topic or in the spike period of topic influenced by spikes.
The article closes with some suggested applications of their models to analyze alert-based news services to help identify news items that are worthy of attention. They also suggest that marketing can use the model to look at the mindshare topics relevant to the marketing interests are gaining in the blog world.
Hi --
Thanks for the link to Information Diffusion through Blogspace. Timely and apropos.
John
Posted by: John T. Maloney | November 16, 2004 at 02:54 PM