In the process of researching a paper for an upcoming conference at the end of the month I did some research on the coverage of weblogs in the popular press. I queried the LexisNexis database for references to "weblog," "web log," and "blog" resulting in 4051 magazine and newspaper articles from 1998 to the present.Continue reading “Popular press and weblogs”
Category Archives: Research
Weblogs and churn rate
The first question that every journalist asks about weblogs—how many are there— has been a source of constant debate over the past year. I was cited in the Economist with the number 500,000, which prompted a response, as well as a number of new efforts for estimating this number: Blogcensus is a funded project crawlingContinue reading “Weblogs and churn rate”
The Significance of Diaries
While reading for my generals, I have been taking note of all weblog/diary related material with the intention of posting it eventually. Today I ran across an engaging quote in Yi-Fu Tuan’s paper Significance of Artifact: Diaries retain a measure of the past in the present. First as a physical object we can see thatContinue reading “The Significance of Diaries”
OpenSource Science vs. The Journals
Ever since George Soros announced that he would be donating $3 million to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, debate over the e-journal versus traditional journals has been heating up. An article today from the BBC points out some a few critics attacking the net journal initiative. In many ways, these criticisms are the same onesContinue reading “OpenSource Science vs. The Journals”
Internet addiction? Yay!
Perhaps I need to see someone from an Internet/Computer Addiction Service. My job might necessitate anti-depressants.
Society is happy.. barely
People are marginally happy, at best, according to Google: “I love my life,” 8280 pages to “I hate my life,” 8070.
Scrabble vowels gone missing
People making games beware: Scrabble vowel shortage revealed, thanks to faulty pseudorandomness. Also a tasty morsel of Scrabble trivia: Alfred Butts invented Scrabble in 1931 after studying the front page of the New York Times for months to calculate how often each of the 26 letters in the Roman alphabet is used in English words.Continue reading “Scrabble vowels gone missing”
Jouralist Josh has a backlash
Josh had quite a reaction to our panel at SXSW.
NewsBlaster
In today’s SearchDay, Chris Sherman introduced a new project from the Columbia Natural Language Processing group called Newsblaster, an automatic content aggregator, which, unlike Blogdex, actually culls similar content into one descriptive passage. Chris noted: “If such a system were combined with a URL monitoring service, and seeded with a taxonomy of subjects personally interestingContinue reading “NewsBlaster”
Real research on weblogs
I’ve been swimming in blog data for the past few days, preparing for my upcoming presentation at Sunbelt XXII, a social networks conference. Needless to say, I’ll be working up until the last minute, looking for new insights. I’ll make sure and let you know if I have any 🙂
overstated 