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The science of blog reading
October 25, 2007
The problem of detecting contaminants in a public water system is analogous to the problem of figuring out what's going on in the blogosphere, write a team of Carnegie-Mellon researchers in an award-winning paper called Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks:
Given a water distribution network, where should we place sensors to quickly detect contaminants? Or, which blogs should we read to avoid missing important stories? These seemingly different problems share common structure: Outbreak detection can be modeled as selecting nodes (sensor locations, blogs) in a network, in order to detect the spreading of a virus or information as quickly as possible.
Starting from that insight, the researchers have come up with a nifty list of the 100 blogs you should read if you can only read 100 blogs. (Bloggers Blog offers a more user-friendly version of the list.) Rather than relying on dubious measures of influence, the list focuses purely on efficiency. It seeks to minimize the amount of time a person has to invest in reading blogs while ensuring that the person gets the fullest possible sense of what's going on in the blogosphere at any given moment. The authors make the following observation:
A naive, intuitive solution would be to select the big, well-known blogs. However, these usually have a large number of posts, and are time-consuming to read. We show, that, perhaps counterintuitively, a more cost-effective solution can be obtained, by reading smaller, but higher quality, blogs, which our algorithm can find.
In case you were wondering, Rough Type comes in at Number 61, just a few spots behind Cowboy Blob's Saloon and Shootin Gallery.
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Comments
Am I the only one who finds it richly ironic that one of the can't-miss blogs is Creating Passionate users (last updated: um, a long time ago)?
Scoble snuck in under the wire. Whew, to think I almost missed breaking news, there.
No offense to Creating Passionate Users, but unless the site compiler(s) decided it was eternal and always top of mind, ya'd think they'd list a non-defunct blog.
Posted by: Ethan ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.roughtype.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 25, 2007 12:30 AM
Sounds like TechMeme to me.
Posted by: Jake at October 25, 2007 12:49 AM
I wonder how much time would it take daily to read "only" the 100 blogs selected?
Posted by: Sergey Schetinin at October 25, 2007 04:37 AM
OK, it's obvious, but:
"The problem of detecting contaminants in a public water system is analogous to the problem of figuring out what's going on in the blogosphere ..."
So the bogosphere is REALLY like a sewer?
Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at October 25, 2007 04:42 AM
Rankings are just silly. Finding contaminants isn't.
When one is looking for contaminants, knows exactly what he is looking for, a set of known molecules which are bad for health or for the environment. The target is always the same for everybody. But looking for what happens on the blogosphere is meaningless. What is interesting for me, probably won't be interesting for you. We all are looking for different things! After reading the list these guys produced, I found few blogs I already read and I didn't find many blogs that few people read but which are of high value for me. Not to mention that most blogs in the list are in English and that I read blogs in four more languages.
Rankings are made for the ranked and for the media, which love this ordered world. But, fortunately, the real world is chaos, and there is no rank able to grasp a slight part of this chaos.
Posted by: pqs at October 25, 2007 10:12 AM
That you read four languages and are able to read my mind makes ranking you a suitable subject for much conjecture! Right on pqs.
The study is certainly a heady piece of work that appears to be analogous to my own experience.
The statement “detecting contaminants in a public water system is analogous to the problem of figuring out what's going on in the blogosphere” brings all sorts of possible comments bubbling to the surface.
I had no idea that I was allocating my activities early on in the cascading information process or that sub modularity or combinatorial optimization was such a critical part of my decision to go online for my daily information stream. I am reassured to know that the study acknowledges my placement in this process as being cost effective, but to whom?
Alan
Posted by: alan at October 25, 2007 10:35 AM
They could have kept the list to just one
http://www.megite.com
They also included Reddit on the list.
That being said, Megite whilst they have a blog isn't a blog.
Posted by: AndyBeard at October 25, 2007 09:18 PM
pqs, agreed.
Their definition of "efficiency" assumes too much. I don't read blogs to find out what's going on in the blogoshere; I read blogs because I like those blogs. I read blogs about the topics that interest me, not just politics and news, but other things like feminist theory and New York City vegan happenings.
Posted by: Elaine Vigneault at October 26, 2007 04:01 PM
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