Search and the blogs

[Via Smart MOBS]


A Study of Blog Search
Gilad Mishne Maarten de Rijke
Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam,
Kruislaan 403, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
gilad,mdr@science.uva.nl
Abstract. We present an analysis of a large blog search engine query
log, exploring a number of angles such as query intent, query topics, and
user sessions. Our results show that blog searches have dierent intents
than general web searches, suggesting that the primary targets of blog
searchers are tracking references to named entities, and locating blogs by
theme. In terms of interest areas, blog searchers are, on average, more
engaged in technology, entertainment, and politics than web searchers,
with a particular interest in current events. The user behavior observed
is similar to that in general web search: short sessions with an interest
in the first few results only.

In the Arab world, a blog can mean prison

In democratic countries, personal Web sites known as Weblogs have grown exponentially over the past few years. In the United States, for example, there are literally millions of "blogs."

Not yet in the Middle East, even though there are many parallels in the region with what has made the phenomenon explode in the United States. For example, blogging technology is available to anyone with access to the Internet, it is cheap, indeed free, and content can easily be created in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and other languages. While home-computer ownership is still embryonic, the deep suspicion of government-owned mainstream media has almost certainly helped spur the growth in the region's Weblogs.

But there is at least one critical difference. In most of the countries of the Middle East, using a personal Weblog to express political dissent can land someone in jail as easily as taking part in an unauthorized political protest in a public square. For example, recently in Iran - one of the worst anti-blogger offenders - a blogger was jailed for 14 years for "spying and aiding foreign counterrevolutionaries," after using his site to criticize the arrest of other online journalists. Despite the risks, an estimated 75,000 Iranians among the country's five million Internet users maintain online blogs. Especially among middle class youth, they have become an important way of expressing dissatisfaction.

Mona al-Tahawy, a columnist at the London-based Saudi daily Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, writes that bloggers in Iran and Iraq "have inspired others in the Arab world." She also adds: "Despite working in an elite medium, requiring a computer and literacy, bloggers are the voice of the true Arab Street, especially the young."

Like Iran, most countries of the region impose varying degrees of restriction on Weblogs. Saudi Arabia, where authorities block some 400,000 Web sites, is among the most restrictive. It is unclear how many blogsites there are in the kingdom, but those that are accessible focus largely on political dissent.

Typical is a site called "The Religious Policeman." One recent posting asked:

"What reforms? There aren't any reforms! The government promised to set up a higher commission on women's affairs, guaranteed women participation in the recent National Dialogue Forum and in the National Human Rights Commission." It adds: "The National Dialogue Forum agreed to change nothing, the 'team photo' had no women in it, anyone with any sense left in tears."

In Iraq today, there are hundreds of blogsites, most of them run by Iraqis, but also some by American and other coalition soldiers. There are communist, monarchist, Kurdish, Assyrian, Islamist, Shiite, Sunni, nationalist and secularist blogs. Their political positions range from full support for the U.S. invasion and occupation to rabid calls for a jihad against the Americans.

For example, on the one-year commemoration of the start of the Iraq war, a 24-year-old female computer programmer wrote in her "Baghdad Burning" blog: "Occupation Day, April 9, 2003: The day we sensed that the struggle in Baghdad was over and the fear of war was nothing compared to the new fear we were currently facing. It was the day I saw my first American tank roll grotesquely down the streets of Baghdad - through a residential neighborhood. And that was April 9 for me and millions of others." She added: "The current Governing Council wants us to remember April 9 fondly and hail it as our 'National Day,' a day of victory." But, she asks, "whose victory?"

In Egypt, authorities have tightened their control of the country's 600,000 Web users. For example, the Web master of the English-language Al-Ahram Weekly was sentenced to a year in prison for posting a sexually explicit poem, and a 19-year-old student was sentenced to a month in jail for "putting out false information" after reporting that a serial killer was on the loose in Cairo.

In Syria, one blogger asked others to sign an online petition addressed to "The White House" and "The ElysŽes" [sic], the French presidential palace. "With the killing of [former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Lebanon," the site said, "Syrian Baathists are out of control. Who's next? Syria is inciting civil war in Lebanon." Another Syrian, calling himself "Kafka," wrote that a recent speech to the Syrian Parliament by President Bashar Assad "made the Syrian people forget that [he] never cared to give a damn about us since he came to power."

In Tunisia, President Zine al-Abidin ben Ali has been determined to stamp out all cyber-dissidence. The death just over a week ago of prominent cyber-dissident Zouhair Yahyaoui, who was sent to jail in 2002-03 for publishing an open letter by his uncle, a prominent magistrate, asking for an independent judiciary, provided a reminder of how harshly the regime had treated the young editor of Tunisia's most popular TuneZine Web site. But Yahyaoui was not alone. Recently, a well-known lawyer was arrested merely for posting an article online.

In Bahrain, two online-forum moderators were recently arrested. Nonetheless, a Bahraini blog called "Sabbah's Blog" was busy organizing a "Middle East Bloggers Meetup." Dozens of enthusiastic comments were posted by readers. Even in poverty-stricken Afghanistan, blogging is beginning to catch on. One Afghan blog reports: "During the Taliban we didn't have the Internet, but now there are about 25 net cafes in Kabul, and also some in Herat, Kandahar, and Balkh provinces. People are really interested to use the Internet but it's too expensive." It adds: "Only rich people can afford it."

There may well be an inverse relationship between the suppression of free expression and the proliferation of blogs in the Middle East. Maybe the lesson for heads of state in the region is this: It's far better to increase freedom of speech and reduce the challenge and expense of having to deal with this cyber uproar.

Blogging For Political Change

This is this first in a series of discussion on MyDD that focuses on an essay in Get This Party Started. All discussions will be led by the author of the essay in question. Next Thursday, our guest will be Alan Abramowitz. On February 9th, our guest will be Anna Greenberg. Future guests will be announced when they are scheduled.

My article in Get This Party Started is entitled "Blogging for Political Change." I wrote this essay back in late April and early May of 2005, under the premise that it is very difficult, if not impossible, for existing stakeholders in the progressive movement to understand how to work with blogs, bloggers and the blogosphere if they do not understand how blogs, bloggers and the blogosphere operates. It is in this sense that my essay is part of my larger project to help educate progressive stakeholders and the Democratic establishment about the nature of the progressive blogosphere. One other such prominent work in this project as the paper I co-authored with Matt for the New Politics Institute: The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere. If major stakeholders in the progressive community do not even understand blogs, how can we ever hope to have a more successful, productive relationship with these stakeholders?

The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere.

Posted by Derek Powazek on February 22, 2006. Tags: Favorites

We've put a few more "Featured Favorites" into rotation today. Check them out for a great example of what you can do with Technorati Favorites.

• Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes Food and Cooking Blog
• Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Networking News
• Michelle Malkin of her Top 100 Blog
• Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion

Thanks to these kind bloggers for sharing their favorite blogs!

Blogs discussing this post

Got Favorites?

Posted by Derek Powazek on February 21, 2006. Tags: Favorites

The number of blogs doubles every five months. As I'm writing this, Technorati is tracking 28.4 million blogs. That's a whole lot of voices. Here at Technorati, we want to make the world of weblogs accessible, searchable, and fun for everyone to explore. Today we're taking another step in that direction with a brand new feature: Technorati Favorites.

It's really very simple. Just tell us who your favorite bloggers are and you'll get a custom page that lets you monitor, search, and share your Favorites!

Can't wait? Go give it a try! For the curious, read on for more details.

We've made it as easy as possible to add blogs to your Favorites. All over Technorati, just click the star icon () to add that blog to your favorites. Looking for good blogs on a certain topic? Check out Blog Finder and add blogs from there!

There's also a bookmarklet you can take with you, so you can add to your favorites wherever you browse (get it on the Favorites Help page). And if you use another subscription tool or service, you can export your subscriptions and import them using the Favorites Importer!

Once you've got some favorites, you'll see the most recent posts from them, newest to oldest, as they happen. If you prefer RSS, don't worry, it's available.

Got your own blog? Wanna make it easy for Technorati members to mark is as a favorite? Just use one of these handy buttons! You can even display recent posts from your Favorites on your own blog with the Favorites Widget.

But the best part is that now you can search just your favorite blogs. The second tab on every keyword search result is now "Your Favorites" - click it to search just your favorite blogs.

Finally, Technorati Favorites are for sharing! Note that everyone has a public favorites page (here's mine). You can share yours with your friends with the link at the top of your Favorites page.

To help us kick off this new feature, we asked some prominent bloggers what their favorite blogs are, and they obliged! So check out what's new in these people's favorite blogs:

• Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post
• Christopher Michel of Military.com
• Doc Searls of the Doc Searls Weblog
• And our very own David Sifry, CEO of Technorati

Thanks to these four for helping us kick off Technorati Favorites, and stay tuned - we'll be adding more soon!

As usual, we really want to know what you think of this new feature, so please let us know.

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State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search

Posted by Dave Sifry on February 14, 2006. Tags: Blogosphere

In Part 1 of the State of the Blogosphere report, I covered the overall growth of the blogosphere. Today I'm going to cover the growth of the blogosphere as media, and discuss some of the emerging trends that deal with handling information overload. In a world of over 50,000 postings per hour, and over 70,000 new weblogs created each day, keeping on top of and in tune with the most interesting and influential people and topics is the new frontier beyond search. I've also got some surprises for you at the end of this post, two new features that I hope you'll find useful. But first, let's get our hands dirty in the data!

MSM vs. Blogs

To start, let's look at how attention has been shifting in the blogosphere. In the chart below, the top news and media sites are charted according to the number of bloggers linking to them, and clearly, people are still paying a lot of attention to mainstream media stalwarts like The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post.

For these sites, which sit on what I call The "Big Head" of the curve (as opposed to the now-famous "long tail," four blogs -- BoingBoing, Engadget, PostSecret, and Daily Kos -- show up. This may look a bit smaller than the data of last August, but a quick look a bit further down the tail starts telling a more interesting story (Note that I've flipped the axes so that you can see more data):

As you continue down the media attention curve past the "big head", that the number of blogs starts to grow.

The Long Tail

The chart below shows the attention curve once you get past the blogs that look just like mainstream media above. It is important to note how long the long tail really is: this chart at this scale doesn't show it - the long tail of the blogging world goes out to 27.8 million blogs. To give a sense of scale, if this chart was kept to the same scale and I printed out the additional sheets necessary on regular 8.5 x 11 inch sheets of paper in landscape mode to show the entire long tail, the length of the complete graph would be about 120 pages long, making the entire chart about 110 feet long!

Movement along the curve

With so may blogs and bloggers out there, one might think that it is a lost cause for new bloggers to achieve any significant audience, that the power curve means that there's no more room left at the top of the "A-List".

Fortunately, the data shows that this isn't the case.

Thanks to the Wayback machine, here's a look at the Technorati Top 100 as it appeared on November 26, 2002 (bear with me if the wayback machine is slow). Then look at it as it appeared on December 5, 2003. And again on November 30, 2004. And again on April 1, 2005. And now look at it today.

Let's take a few examples. Have a look at PostSecret. It is the #3 site on the Technorati Top 100 today, with over 12,000 sites that have linked to it in the last 180 days. It didn't even exist on the chart in April of 2005. Or look at The Huffington Post. It is #5 on the Top 100. It too, didn't exist on the chart in April of 2005. Or look at the #47 blog in April, 2005 Baghdad Burning. This blog still is regularly posting, but has fallen to #304.

This should not be meant to imply that there are no network effects, or that a power law relationship doesn't exist in the Blogosphere. Of course there are network effects. But I want to go a level or two deeper than just thinking about the blogosphere as an A-List and The Long Tail -- for that's far too simplistic, and leaves out some of the most interesting blogs and bloggers out there.

The Magic Middle

This realm of publishing, which I call "The Magic Middle" of the attention curve, highlights some of the most interesting and influential bloggers and publishers that are often writing about topics that are topical or niche, like Chocolate and Zucchini on food, Wi-fi Net News on Wireless networking, TechCrunch on Internet Companies, Blogging Baby on parenting, Yarn Harlot on knitting, or Stereogum on music - these are blogs that are interesting, topical, and influential, and in some cases are radically changing the economics of trade publishing.

At Technorati, we define this to be the bloggers who have from 20-1000 other people linking to them. As the chart above shows, there are about 155,000 people who fit in this group. And what is so interesting to me is how interesting, exciting, informative, and witty these blogs often are. I've noticed that often these blogs are more topical or focused on a niche area, like gardening, knitting, nanotech, mp3s or journalism and a great way to find them has been through Blog Finder.

Explore: Dealing with Information Overload

Given that there's a lot of interesting topical posts by influential or authoritative bloggers in those topic areas, we formulated an idea: Why not use these authoritative bloggers as a new kind of editorial board? Watch what they do, what they post about, and what they link to as input to a new kind of display - a piece of media that showed you the most interesting posts and conversations that related to a topic area, like food, or technology, or politics, or PR. The idea is to use the bloggers that know the most about an area or topic to help spot the interesting trends that may never hit the "A-list". We call this new section Explore, and we've seeded it with some of the most interesting topics that we could find. But one of the nice things about Explore is that there are no gatekeepers, and that anyone who writes interesting topical blog posts can get included simply by tagging his blog and tagging his posts.

It's still pretty new, and occasionally an irrelevant post or two sneaks into the display. We're working on fixing that, but one of the new features we're launching today is the ability to subscribe to a RSS feed of any explore category, so you can now read the most interesting posts via your favorite newsreader.

These middle tier blogs also define communities of interest in the blogosphere. Its easy to think of the blogosphere as a cacophony of voices spread out over a big long tail distribution. But Blog Finder and Explore help resolve these thousands of blogs into topical, relevant communities of interest that interlink, refer to one another and often wrestle with ideas, discuss them and move them along. People often ask, "what blogs should I read?" And often times a good answer is, "you should read the posts from the leading blogs in topics that of interest you. Blog Finder and Explore make this possible for the first time on a wide variety of topics--- and in so doing we hope will the blgosphere more approachable, useful, and comprehensible to more people than ever before.

Filter By Authority: Giving YOU the power to tune your searches

There's one more big feature that I wanted to write about tonight, our new Filter By Authority feature. You can see this on all keyword search results pages, looking like this:

Clicking on the green slider allows you to easily refine your search results to show greater or fewer matching blog posts. For some searches, you might want to pick and choose only posts from blogs that have been around a while and are highly influential - so pick "a lot of authority" as shown above. I've found this great for searches on highly trafficked topics, like "George Bush" or Olympics, or on topics that are known to get a lot of spam, like mortgage or refinance. I find that it often helps me to also answer the question, "Who is the most influential blogger talking about ___ this week, and what did she say?"

Clicking lower on the slider gives you the ability to see how different levels of filtering affect your search results. For my ego feeds, I always want to see every single mention, so I turn off filtering for those feeds. I also love looking at the charts on the left-hand side of each search result to see what changes when I change the filter, too.

As we implemented this feature, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to name it. We frequently use the term authority on our site when we talk about inbound links, as in "a link is a vote of authority." So to maintain consistency we called this new feature, " sort by authority." But in no way should this imply a value judgment. More authority doesn't necessarily mean more good or more interesting. In many instances, less authority yields more interesting results: a greater diversity of opinion, less mainstream thinking, more individual voices. The authority filter is a tool to fine tune results, and its a great way to zoom in on the voices that are commanding the most attention, and then zoom back out and listen to the whole diverse medium that is the blogosphere. With so many voices we're happy to add a new tuning control!

This new feature is a beta feature, so we're looking for your feedback! Do you like it? Find it useful? Or is it confusing? What about the name? We tried a number of different names for the feature, but ended up picking "filter by authority" since we speak about a blogger's authority as being based on the number of links he gets from other people, but it isn't a perfect analogy. In the end, we decided that rather than having the perfect name, we'd much rather get the feature out there for all of you to try, and we'd listen intently to your feedback and comments.

In Summary

• Blogging and Mainstream Media continue to share attention in blogger's and reader's minds, but bloggers are climbing higher on the "big head" of the attention curve, with some bloggers getting more attention than sites including Forbes, PBS, MTV, and the CBC.
• Continuing down the attention curve, blogs take a more and more significant position as the economics of the mainstream publishing models make it cost prohibitive to build many nice sites and media
• Bloggers are changing the economics of the trade magazine space, with strong entries covering WiFi, Gadgets, Internet, Photography, Music, and other nice topic areas, making it easier to thrive, even on less aggregate traffic.
• There is a network effect in the Technorati Top 100 blogs, with a tendency to remain highly linked if the blogger continues to post regularly and with quality content.
• Looking at the historical data shows that the inertia in the Top 100 is very low - in other words, the number of new blogs jumping to the top of the Top 100 as well as he blogs that have fallen out of the top 100 show that the network effect is relatively weak.
• The Magic Middle is the 155,000 or so weblogs that have garnered between 20 and 1,000 inbound links. It is a realm of topical authority and significant posting and conversation within the blogosphere.
• Technorati Explore is a new feature that uses the authoritative topical bloggers as a distributed editorial team, highlighting the most interesting blog posts and links in over 2,500 categories.
• The new Filter By Authority slider makes it easy to refine a search and look for either a wider array of thoughts and opinions, or to narrow the search to only bloggers that have lots of other people linking to them. This gives you the power to decide how much filtering you want.

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Giving GrabPERF a new home

Posted by Niall Kennedy on February 10, 2006. Tags: Blogosphere

Technorati is now hosting GrabPERF, a blog performance monitoring project created by Stephen Pierzchala in a Silicon Valley basement. We've been big fans of GrabPERF's distributed monitoring service and want to make sure it continues to serve the web community. Stephen has posted his own announcement on his blog.

Above is a picture of the old GrabPERF rack, complete with a small wine cellar and cable modem. GrabPERF is now hosted at 365 Main in San Francisco along with Technorati's existing hundreds of servers. The web server and database are now connected to a fatter bandwidth pipe allowing Dave and other stat-loving geeks refresh the page with quicker response times.

GrabPERF monitoring locations are spread throughout the world to emulate the load times and experiences of a variety of users. Technorati numbers reported by the service are collected from these various survey locations throughout the world and are not affected by the new hosting arrangement.

Thanks to everyone who helped keep the service alive and continues to make GrabPERF and web services in general a continued success.

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State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth

Posted by Dave Sifry on February 06, 2006. Tags: Blogosphere

It's been 4 months since last October's State of the Blogosphere report, so it's time to update the numbers! For historical perspective, you can see earlier State of the Blogosphere reports from July 2005, from March 2005, and from October 2004.

The State of the Blogosphere is Strong

OK, I'm paraphrasing from a more famous speech that happened last week, but the truth is that the blogosphere continues to grow at a quickening pace. Technorati currently tracks 27.2 million weblogs, and the blogosphere we track continues to double about every 5.5 months, as the chart below shows:

The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago.

New blog creation continues to grow. We currently track over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day - and 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. In other words, even though there's a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging is growing as a habitual activity. In October of 2005, when Technorati was only tracking 19 million blogs, about 10.4 million bloggers were still posting 3 months after the creation of their blogs.

In addition to that, about 2.7 million bloggers update their blogs at least weekly. Here's a chart of the number of new blogs created each day, from January 2004 to January 2006:

Dealing with Spam

There has been an increase in the overall noise level in the blogosphere, most notably in the number of spam and fake pings that are sent - what I call "spings." These spam pings are fake or bogus notifications that a blog has been updated; in some cases, these spings can amount to a denial-of-service attack, and can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total pings Technorati receives. However, we've built a sophisticated system that mitigates the spings, and helps to keep spam blogs out of our indexes. Beyond that, about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated, or are attempts to create link farms or click fraud. Technorati continues to take an ecosystem approach to solving this problem, working closely with other players such as Amazon, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Drupal, Google, MSN, Six Apart, Tucows, WordPress and Yahoo!, and there will be another Web Spam Squashing Summit this spring, building on the success of the previous two summits.

A News Cycle Measured in Megahertz

Moving beyond spam, the number of people reaching out and reaching each other continues to grow. Daily Posting Volume tracked by Technorati continues to grow, and the blogosphere also reacts to world events. I've pointed out a number of the spikes in posting volume that have accompanied major news events in the chart below of posting volume:

We track about 1.2 million posts each day, which means that there are about 50,000 posts each hour. At that rate, it is literally impossible to read everything that is relevant to an issue or subject, and a new challenge has presented itself - how to make sense out of this monstrous conversation, and how to find the most interesting and authoritative information out there.

The Continued Rise of Tagging

In January 2005, Technorati launched its tagging service, based on the rel=tag microformat, which is a simple way for bloggers to associate their posts with topics, and to make it easy for people to find interesting posts on a given subject. Today, we have tracked over 81 million posts with tags or categories - and over 400,000 new tagged posts are created every day. The chart below shows the immense growth of tagging in the past year:

Tags for Blogs

There was still a major problem, however - how to easily find the most interesting blogs on the subjects that you cared about. So, in September 2005, Technorati launched Blog Finder, a tags-based way for people to find the most authoritative blogs on a particular subject, allowing bloggers to tag their blogs with the subjects they felt were most relevant for themselves. In 4 months, over 850,000 blogs have been put into Blog Finder, making it the most comprehensive directory of blogs on the web. Over 2,500 categories have already attracted a critical mass of influential bloggers writing about them, from Politics and Technology to Gardening or Erotica. And more are created every day, making it easier for people to find the most interesting blogs in the topics they care about.

In summary:

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

Tomorrow: Going beyond search and tags, to discovery.

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Commitment to Better Customer Support

Posted by Janice Myint on January 30, 2006. Tags: Technorati News

In its commitment to continually improve its service, Technorati has recently brought me on board as a full time Customer Support Specialist. We are dedicated to addressing the current support issues in a timely manner, reducing the present support backlog, and improving online Troubleshooting and Help documentation to aid users utilize Technorati to its fullest.

One issue we are currently working on resolving is the difficulty completing blog claims where the "Checking for Technorati Goodness" page is hanging. If you see this in the meantime, please let Support know and we can help you complete the claim. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me-I am just an email away . Thanks!

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"Du bist Deutschland" Explained

Posted by Ryan King on January 25, 2006. Tags: Blogosphere

You may have noticed that "Du bist Deutschland" has been the top search on Technorati for some time. Non-German-speaking readers likely aren't familiar with what's going on in the German blogosphere, so let me see if I can explain a bit.

A PR campaign has been going on for quite awhile in Germany with the slogan "Du bist Deutschland." The campaign has been quite controversial in Germany. Among other things, someone found a photo from around 1935 of Nazi propaganda using a similar phrase. As far as I can tell, this blog post is the discoverer of the photo (Correction: it was first discovered on a forum.). Also, see this post for some more background (in English).

All of this controversy has been going on since at least last November, but has been re-ignited lately. Last week, Jean-Remy von Matt, an executive at the organization running the campaign sent an email to his colleagues, which was soon posted to a blog by Jens Scholz (English translation on Jens' blog).

The second point of the email refers to blogs and has a another English translation on Scott Hanson's blog.

In short, he called blogs the "bathroom walls of the Internet." And bloggers "people who only exude*." As evidence for this filthiness, he suggests that people put "Du bist Deutschland" into technorati.com to see what bloggers have said about the campaign. As a result of this, a large number of people have been searching for "Du bist Deutschland" on Technorati.

For more explanation, see also Der Spiegel's take on this controversy.

* It appears the German word used here, absondern is a derogatory term for sharing one's thoughts, which can be translated as 'exude' or as one several coarser verbs.

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Blog That Chart!

Posted by Derek Powazek on January 16, 2006. Tags: Technorati News

A few weeks ago, we added charts to our results pages. Tonight, we added even more charty wholesomeness! Now you can click the chart on any results page to dive deep into the data. For example, charting "Jack Bauer" shows that the hero of "24" is once again having a big day.

But that's not all - if you find a great chart and want to post it to your blog, now you can! Just look for the "Blog this chart" instructions at the bottom of every chart page and grab the code. (Note: If you've previously posted a chart to your blog, the image locations have changed - you may need to update it.)

Here's the chart for Jack Bauer, for example:

Posts that contain "jack Bauer" per day for the last 30 days.


Get your own chart!

Also new on the site tonight: We added the top 5 hot tags to the homepage and the top 15 searches du jour to the search page, plus lots of other tweaks and fixes.

As always, please let us know how we're doing.

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Take the Technorati survey!

Posted by Niall Kennedy on January 16, 2006. Tags: Technorati News

Technorati is planning lots of exiting new features for 2006 and we would like to know more about you, your reading and blogging habits, and the features you would most like to see implemented by Technorati this year. Our team has put together a 33-question Technorati survey to help us quantify your preferences and needs.

The first few questions are used for standard demographic profiling to help advertisers on Technorati better understand their potential audience and target their ads accordingly. We ask a few questions about general blogging behavior such as post frequency and favorite tools as well as a few questions about your favorite and most-used Technorati features. At the end of the survey you will have the opportunity to weigh-in on features and services Technorati could develop in the future such as premium member services, business intelligence products, and the searching event and review data from specially formatted blogs.

We'd like your input! Please take a few minutes to answer all or part of our 33-question survey to contribute to the future of Technorati.

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Ping-o-Matic outages

Posted by Niall Kennedy on January 13, 2006. Tags: Blogosphere

Many blog publishers rely on ping relay service Ping-o-Matic to send blog notification updates including Technorati's ping server. Ping-o-Matic has suffered brief outages in the past and the site is now was recently completely offline. To ensure your blog notification updates are received by Technorati you should ping Technorati's servers directly.

If you use WordPress and have not changed your ping settings your update notifications are currently were not reaching any services, including Technorati and many online aggregators. To add Technorati's ping server to your list of update services please follow the instructions on our WordPress ping configuration page.

Technorati has contributed hardware and some coding help to the Ping-o-Matic team in their efforts to provide a service to the blogging community. We will continue to work with Ping-o-Matic to make blog update notifications quick and simple but we recommend bloggers add Technorati to your update notification settings to ensure the message reaches its final destination.

Update: As of Friday evening t

قوّات الأمن الليبي قامت بإغلاق كل مقاهي الإنترنت في المدينة

جانب من التظاهرات الاحتجاجية التي شهدتها ليبيا

تونس، طرابلس الغرب – سليم بوخذير

ذكرت مصادر ليبية لم تكشف عن اسمها لـ"العربية.نت" في مراسلة بالبريد الالكتروني أن "4 شبان ليبيين قتلوا هذا الأسبوع بشارع عبد المنعم رياض أمام مبنى الإذاعة على يد قوات الأمن" ضمن تظاهرات جرت في إطار تداعيات أحداث الجمعة الدامية ضد الرسومات المسيئة للرسول صلى الله عليه وسلم، والتي شهدت مقتل ما لا يقل عن 10 متظاهرين وكذلك حرق القنصلية الإيطالية بمدينة بنغازي .

وتابعت المصادر ذاتها أن مدينة بنغازي تشهد منذ مساء يوم الثلاثاء 21-2-2006 "انتشارا واسعا لفرق الجيش وتضمّ كل فرقة حوالي 10سيارت جيش"، وأضافت أنّ هذه الفرق "تجوب كل المحافظة وتقوم بتفريق كل ّ اثنين واقفين في الشارع"، وتابعت المصادر ذاتها أن "قوّات الأمن الليبي قامت بإغلاق كل مقاهي الإنترنت في المدينة " .

وكانت المدينة قد شهدت الثلاثاء 21 فبراير 2006 وفاة آخر ضحايا تظاهرة الجمعة الدامية ضدّ الرسومات المسيئة للرسول الكريم ببنغازي، و اسمه مراد الساحلي وهو من سكان حي "السكابلي" بالمدينة، حيث جرى دفنه في مقبرة "الهواري" .

وقالت المصادر نفسها إنّ جموعا حاشدة من أهالي بنغازي شاركت في الجنازة مردّدين هتافات مناهضة للحكومة من قبيل "ياشهيد ارتاح ارتاح حانكملو الكفاح" و "بنغازي انتي حرّة و الخائن يطلع برّة" وأضافت أن "المشيّعين قاموا بما يشبه الزفّة للفقيد وانّهم قاموا بتكسير صور رئيس الحكومة الليبية".

وقالت المصادرنفسها إنّ "حملة اعتقالات واسعة كانت قامت بها قوات الأمن الليبي منذ مساء أول أمس الاثنين بمنطقة بن يونس وشملت أغلب الشبان الذين شاركوا في التظاهرة الشهيرة" على أساس أنها "تشتبه في مشاركتهم في حرق مركز رأس عبيدة" وقالت المصادر إن "عدد المعتقلين بلغ حولي 150 شابا".

ووصفت المصادر "انتشار قوات الأمن و الجيش في المدينة" بأنّه صار "كثيفا جدا ويوحي وكأنّ البلد في حالة حرب".

ونفت من جهة أخرى المصادر ذاتها "صحّة ما تمّ بثه في وسائل الإعلام الرسمية بليبيا عن نقل المصابين للعلاج بالخارج" ذاكرة أن "الذين وقع نقلهم إلى الخارج للعلاج هم فقط أعوان ومنتسبي حركة اللجان الثوريّة ممّن أصيبوا في أحداث الجمعة الدامية"، وأضافت أن "المصابين من المواطنين مازالوا طريحي الفراش في مستشفى السبيعة في طرابلس".

وقالت المصادر من جهة أخرى إن تضاهرات موازية شهدتها مدينة سلوق 50 كلم شرق بنغازي هذا الأسبوع ممّا أسفر عن "حرق المثابة الثوريّة " و أن تظاهرات أخرى شهدتها مدينة طبرق و"أسفرت عن حرق مركز البريد بالمدينة "، ولم يتسنّ لـ"العربية.نت " الحصول على أي موقف من المصادر الليبية الرسمية من صدقية هذه الأخبار.

Telecommunications Infrastructure in Egypt

Internet

Internet use is constrained by cost, language, rates of literacy, inadequate infrastructure and skills shortages, while e-commerce, still in its infancy, is beset by legal and regulatory hurdles. However, with strong support from the government, which hopes to turn the country from an IT laggard into an IT hub, Egypt is witnessing something of an Internet boom. There was an estimated 3.5m internet users in 2004, up from 535,000 in 2000. In a bold move, the government launched free Internet services in January 2002. The consumer no longer pays fees to Internet service providers (ISPs), but instead pays only the price of a regular call--extremely cheap by international standards. ISPs lease access ports from the state fixed-line monopoly, TE, and purchase a dial-up number, which they then market to consumers. In return, TE pays the ISPs 70% of the revenue from connections made through their phone number. However, the measure is controversial with ISPs who complain of high leasing rates and say their profit margins are low. Many of the smaller ISPs among the 64 in operation when the new system was introduced have since closed.

To encourage the development of the Information Communications Technology (ICT) industry, the government has lowered import tariffs on computers, computer equipment and software to 5%. Domestic hardware manufacturing capabilities are limited--essentially hardware is either imported completed or in parts and assembled in Egypt. In late 2002 the government launched "the affordable personal computer initiative", which aims to raise the ownership of computers from 1.5m (one-third of which were owned by businesses) to 6.5m within five years. The scheme allows buyers to pay in instalments over a period of up to three years at a below-market interest rate. Under the scheme 18 local companies assemble the computers using largely imported parts. About 65,000 computers were sold through the scheme from its launch to March 2004. However, as with most industries, personal computer (PC) sales have suffered because of the depreciation of the Egyptian pound (25% in 2003 alone and 45% since the start of 2000). According to the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), PC sales were around 300,000 in 2002. A massive, five-year e-government programme that aims to modernise state administration was launched in 2002 and is expected to continue at least until 2012. Under the national ICT plan the government had set the highly ambitions target of raising software exports from US$100m in 2002 to US$1bn within three years, and to US$2.5bn by 2009. The programme envisaged establishing a series of dedicated ICT parks or smart villages. The first such village, a E2bn, 450-acre project in Giza, opened in September 2003. It aims to produce 30,000 job opportunities and exports of up to US$600m/year. The MCIT has also enticed a number of large ICT firms to operate training and certification programmes in Egypt, including IBM, Microsoft, Cisco and Lucent Technologies (all US). There are about 6,000 students enrolled in such schemes--which last anything from three weeks to six months--at any one time.

Mass media

Under Mr Mubarak the opposition press has enjoyed greater freedom of expression, although constraints persist and journalists have been imprisoned. With a circulation of around 850,000, the semi-official daily Al Akhbar is Egypts best-selling newspaper, followed by the more establishment-oriented AlAhram, with a circulation of 500,000. Although the press is subject to the control of the Higher Press Council, the four main publishing houses, the AlAhram Group, Dar al-Hilal, Dar Akhbar al-Yom and Dar al-Gomhouriya control most of the press, competing as commercially independent units. Of the opposition press, comprising some three dailies and 40 magazines or periodicals, Al Wafd, the mouthpiece of New Wafd, is by far the most popular, and has a circulation of around 50,000. Al Shaab, the Socialist Labour Partys paper, which has been suspended since May 2000, is the voice of the Islamists, while Al Ahali represents left-wing and often satirical views, and Al Ahrar the liberals. An independent newspaper Al Masri al-Yom was launched in June 2004. Economic news and views are covered in the state Al Ahram al-Iqtisadi or the private Al Alam al-Yom. Newspaper penetration is still low, at around 40copies/day per 1,000 people. With illiteracy rates still high, television is the most influential mass medium. More than 89% of households possessed a television in 2000, while 70% of Egyptians are believed to listen to the radio.

The Arab Television Service started broadcasting in 1960 and there are currently two national and six regional channels in operation. Using the pan-Arab satellite, Arabsat, in December 1990 the Egyptian Satellite Channel began transmission of Egyptian programmes throughout the Arab world. In 1991 the US Cable News Network (CNN) started transmission in Egypt on a subscription basis. In April 1996 Egypt launched its first satellite, Nilesat, which offers 84 television channels and 400 radio stations. A second satellite was launched in August 2000. The first private satellite stations, al-Mehwar and Dream, began transmission in November 2001, and the first private FM radio stations, Nile FM and Negoum FM, began broadcasting in June 2003. There are eight state-run radio networks. A new duty-free Media Production City has been established in 6th October City near Cairo as part of Egypts plan to challenge the dominance of Saudi and Western satellite broadcasters.

Telecommunications Infrastructure

The modernisation, expansion and liberalisation of telecommunications services and related infrastructure is a national development priority. A US$1.1bn, three-year plan to make the country a regional information technology (IT) hub was announced in 2000 and Egypt signed the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Basic Telecommunications Agreement in June 2002, thereby committing itself to greater liberalisation of the sector. The telecoms network has undergone extensive modernisation in recent years. Egypt became the 59th member of the WTO IT Agreement in April 2003, which commits it to removing all tariffs, duties and charges on IT imports by January 2005. Between 1981 and June 2004 the number of fixed lines in operation, run by the state-owned land line monopoly, Telecom Egypt (TE), increased from 510,000 lines to 9.2m (raising penetration to about 13%). The goal is to improve teleaccessibility from 40% to 90% by 2010.

MobiNil, a consortium comprising France Telecom Mobile International, Motorola (US) and four local partners--Orascom Telecom, the Al Ahram press group, Motorolas agent in Egypt, Systel, and Alcatels agent, Raouf Abdel-Messih--took over the state mobile phone network from TE in May 1998, although Orascom Telecom later bought out Motorola. The consortium inherited 83,500 subscribers and a waiting list of around 25,000 others. By June 2004 subscriptions had risen to 3.6m. A second private consortium, Vodafone Egypt, comprising Vodafone (UK), AirTouch (US) before its merger, Mobile Systems International (UK), CGSAT (France), the local Alkan Group, the state-owned Banque du Caire, and the investment house EFG-Hermes, launched operations in November 1998, and by June 2004 had 3m subscribers. Overall, mobile teledensity had risen to 9.3% by June 2004. TE had wanted to launch a third national mobile operator in 2003 with a strategic partner once the period of exclusivity for MobiNil and Vodafone Egypt ended in November 2002, but its plans faltered owing to a lack of international interest and because of cost considerations. A compromise was found under which TE agreed to relinquish its licence and instead buy a 25.5% stake in Vodafone Egypt with the reimbursed E1.9bn licence fee. Vodafone and TE agreed to establish jointly a new company, Wataneya, to hold 51% of Vodafone Egypt. Vodafone ensured that it would retain a 24.6% shareholding in Vodafone Egypt directly, in addition to its stake in Wataneya, thereby retaining management control. As part of the agreement TE has consented to stay out of the mobile-phone market until November 2007. Instead, Vodafone Egypt and MobiNil will each pay the NTRA E1.24bn over four years for the use of TE's vacant frequency, allowing for expansion and improved service.

Legislation introduced in 1998 removed Telecom Egypts monopoly and made it a joint stock company. Officially valued at US$6bn-7bn, an initial public offering of 20% plus 5% to the companys Employees Shareholder Association, was postponed in October 2000 because of poor market conditions. TE has since said it wants to sell a stake of up to 34% to a strategic investor. However, these plans do not appear to have made much progress. This is partly the result of a period of global telecoms industry consolidation following the technology- market crash of 2000. However, it may also prove difficult to attract multinationals unless they are given some kind of managerial control. The government appears determined to retain a majority stake in TE. The telecoms law passed in February 2002 gives the government a free hand in selling a stake in TE, but stipulates that the state must retain more than 50% of the company. The local Alkan trading group introduced a satellite telecoms system in October 1996.

مزودو خدمات الإنترنت في السعودية يخسرون رغم غلاء الأسعار

دبي- العربية.نت اتهم مزودو الإنترنت في السعودية شركة الاتصالات السعودية بالمسئولية وراء ارتفاع أسعار الخدمات التي يقدمونها بصورة تسبب عبئا على عملائهم من مستخدمي شبكة المعلومات في المملكة كما تكبدهم خسائر جسيمة مع ازدياد عدد المستخدمين، وطالبوا باستجابة سريعة من شركة الاتصالات بخفض هذه التكاليف حتى تتمكن الشركات من تحقيق مطالب عملائها بتخفيض الأسعار.وأجرى موقع البوابة العربية للأخبار التقنية www.aitnews.com -المتخصص في تغطية هذه النوعية من الأخبار- لقاءات مع عدد من مزودي خدمات الإنترنت فأكد معظمهم على ذات الشكوى من أن ارتفاع أسعار الإنترنت ناجم عن التكاليف العالية التي تفرضها عليهم شركة الاتصالات السعودية. وقال أحدهم للموقع إن أرباح شركته لا تتجاوز 20% بسبب هذه التكاليف العالية، كما أشار إلى أن الهيئة العامة للإتصالات وتقنية المعلومات لا تقوم بأي جهد يذكر حيال مشكلة زيادة التكاليف على مزودي خدمات الإنترنت، إذ أنها مهتمة باكتساب شركات جديدة فقط متناسية الشركات القديمة التي من المفترض أن تكون محطّ اهتمامها.علاوة على ذلك، أشار بعض من تحدثوا إلى الموقع بهذا الخصوص إلى إمكانية تعرض شركاتهم لخسائر كبيرة جراء تقديم هذه الخدمات، لاسيما خدمة الإتصال بالإنترنت عبر خطوط الاشتراك الرقمية DSL، والتي بات مزودو الخدمة يخشون من ازدياد عدد المشتركين فيها، حيث إن خسارتهم تزداد كلما زادت السرعات المقدمة، وأشار بعض مزودي الخدمة إلى أن تسعير خدمات DSL تمت بناءً على وعود شفهية من بعض المسؤولين بتخفيض التكاليف.وحسب الموقع فإن الشركات المزودة بخدمات الإنترنت في المملكة العربية السعودية تواصل تذمرها من ارتفاع التكلفة التي تفرضها عليهم شركة الاتصالات السعودية لما لذلك من أثر سلبي على نسبة أرباحهم وهامش التنافس فيما بينهم فضلاً عن تصاعد استياء المشتركين، الأمر الذي يشكل ضغطاً كبيراً عليهم ويدفعهم إلى تخفيض نسبة أرباحهم إلى مستويات متدنية تكاد تعد رمزية وتصل بهم إلى الخسارة في بعض الأحيان. وأكد أحد المسؤولين في كبرى الشركات العاملة في هذا المجال للموقع أن شركته تحصل على أرباح بنسبة 5% فقط وذلك في محاولة لمنافسة الشركات الأخرى. وقال آخر إن انخفاض هامش الأرباح ناجم عن ارتفاع التكلفة المفروضة من شركة الاتصالات السعودية إضافة إلى التكاليف المرافقة لعمليات التسويق والحملات الترويجية والبنى التحتية وما إلى ذلك من مستلزمات أخرى لتقديم خدمات الإنترنت في المملكة.ويرى القائمون على هذه الشركات أنه لا بد من تخفيض التكلفة المفروضة عليهم من قبل شركة الاتصالات لتمكينهم من المنافسة فيما بينهم وتقديم خدمات أفضل لعملائهم، وأبدى أحدهم نوعاً من التفاؤل في استجابة الاتصالات السعودية إلى مطالبهم في خفض هذه التكاليف خلال الفترة القادمة.ورغم من حجم الإنفاق الكبير للمملكة على قطاع تقنية المعلومات إلا أنها لا تزال متخلفة نسبياً مقارنةً مع الدول المجاورة لها التي وصلت سرعة الاتصال بالإنترنت عن طريق خطوط الإشتراك الرقمية في بعضها إلى 2 ميغابايت، وقد تجاوز حجم الإنفاق السنوي في أسواق قطاع تقنية المعلومات في المملكة خلال العام المنصرم 8 مليارات ريال وهي النسبة التي تشكل 40٪ من مجمل الإنفاق في هذا القطاع خليجياً، بنسبة نمو تتجاوز 10٪ سنوياً، في حين بات السوق المحلي لتقنية المعلومات في المملكة يمثل نحو 60 ٪ من مجموع الأسواق الخليجية مجتمعة. وتحتل المملكة المرتبة الخامسة والأربعين ضمن 60 نظاماً اقتصادياً عالمياً متقدماً، وفي هذا الإطار تؤكد الدراسات والأبحاث أن حجم إنفاق السعوديين -من مؤسسات وأفراد- على ساعات استخدام الإنترنت وصل إلى 216 مليون ريال سعودي خلال العام المنصرم بمعدل 18 مليون ريال في الشهر، و يبلغ عدد المشتركين في الإنترنت في المملكة حوالي 1,5 مليون مشترك، فيما شهد السوق زيادة في عدد أجهزة الكمبيوتر الشخصي بمعدل 19٪ خلال العام

Rumsfeld urges to invade the media and blogs: Occupy them, so no one can see or read except what we (U.S. Admin) blog!

[Via Sabbah Blog]

Rumsfeld yesterday called for the military and other government agencies to mount a far more aggressive, swift and nontraditional information campaign to counter the messages of extremist and terrorist groups in the world media.

Rumsfeld criticized the absence of a “strategic communications framework” for fighting terrorism. He also lashed out at the U.S. media, which he blamed for effectively halting recent U.S. military initiatives in the information realm — such as paying to place articles in Iraqi newspapers — through an “explosion of critical press stories.”

“Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today’s media age, but for the most part we, our country, our government, has not.” He said that while the al Qaeda terrorist network and other “extremist” movements “have successfully . . . poisoned the Muslim public’s view of the West, we in the government have barely even begun to compete in reaching their audiences.”

“Our enemies are operating 24/7 across every time zone. That is an unacceptably dangerous deficiency.”

To remedy this, he called for increased communications training for military public affairs officials. He also called for creating 24-hour media operations centers and “multifaceted media campaigns” using the Internet, blogs and satellite television that “will result in much less reliance on the traditional print press.”

While I agree with the cause, I doubt the intentions.

You see, U.S. administration always said that “if you are not with us, you are against us.” So, anyone and everyone who do not agree with Bush administration is ultimately a terrorist?! Is this how the U.S. administration refers to us? I hope not, but no one can tell where they place us.

On the other hand, let’s look at what he said more closely. He claims that “Al Qaeda terrorist network and other “extremist” movements have successfully poisoned the Muslims publics’ view of the West.” The question is how?

Terrorist networks and movements do not have satellite TV stations like the U.S. have, not they have known websites/blogs that Muslim (or non-Muslim) can follow. Even if they have, why are they still up? They can be closed in minutes. And to start a new one and get the crowed again to find it and follow it, etc… seams to be worthless effort.
Read the rest of this entry »

2005-2006 CITS Faculty Lecture Series

Jackie Stevens - Nov. 9, 2005
Department of Law & Society
AgoraXchange: The Pedagogy of a Distributed Online Global Politics Game Design

The Blog Establishment

En 2002, Dave Winer de Scripting News a fait un pari avec un dirigeant du New York Times : en 2007, prédisait Dave, les weblogs dépasseraient le prestigieux quotidien dans des recherches Google sur les principaux sujets d'actu. Deux ans avant la Fin, Jason Kottke a décidé de vérifier ce qu'il en était.

Huit sujets d'actu de 2005, comparaison des résultats, méthodologie pointilleuse, et un résultat de Normand : les médias traditionnels dominent dans l'esprit, mais concrètement, les weblogs font mieux que le New York Times.

Au delà du résultat, ce sont surtout les commentaires de Kottke qui sont intéressants. Notamment ce passage :

En 2007, il sera sans doute difficile de distinguer un weblog d'un média traditionnel. Les sites de Gawker, de Weblogs Inc. et consorts sont certes présentés dans un format blog, on parle certes d'eux comme des blogs, mais à part cela, se différencient-ils vraiment des médias traditionnels ? Engadget a payé 12 personnes pour couvrir le CES de Las Vegas, sans doute autant, voire plus de monde que le New York Times. Le festival de Sundance a également été couvert par des rédacteurs payés par les deux entreprises. Dans l'optique de ce pari, j'aurais du mal à considérer ces sites comme des weblogs.

State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search

State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search

In Part 1 of the State of the Blogosphere report, I covered the overall growth of the blogosphere. Today I'm going to cover the growth of the blogosphere as media, and discuss some of the emerging trends that deal with handling information overload. In a world of over 50,000 postings per hour, and over 70,000 new weblogs created each day, keeping on top of and in tune with the most interesting and influential people and topics is the new frontier beyond search. I've also got some surprises for you at the end of this post, two new features that I hope you'll find useful. But first, let's get our hands dirty in the data!

MSM vs. Blogs

To start, let's look at how attention has been shifting in the blogosphere. In the chart below, the top news and media sites are charted according to the number of bloggers linking to them, and clearly, people are still paying a lot of attention to mainstream media stalwarts like The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post.

For these sites, which sit on what I call The "Big Head" of the curve (as opposed to the now-famous "long tail", four blogs - BoingBoing, Engadget, PostSecret, and Daily Kos show up. This may look a bit smaller than the data of last August, but a quick look a bit further down the tail starts telling a more interesting story (Note that I've flipped the axes so that you can see more data):

As you continue down the media attention curve past the "big head", that the number of blogs starts to grow.

The Long Tail

The chart below shows the attention curve once you get past the blogs that look just like mainstream media above. It is important to note how long the long tail really is: this chart at this scale doesn't show it - the long tail of the blogging world goes out to 27.2 million blogs. To give a sense of scale, if this chart was kept to the same scale and I printed out the additional sheets necessary on regular 8.5 x 11 inch sheets of paper in landscape mode to show the entire long tail, the length of the complete graph would be about 120 pages long, making the entire chart about 110 feet long!

Movement along the curve

With so may blogs and bloggers out there, one might think that it is a lost cause for new bloggers to achieve any significant audience, that the power curve means that there's no more room left at the top of the "A-List".

Fortunately, the data shows that this isn't the case.

Thanks to the Wayback machine, here's a look at the Technorati Top 100 as it appeared on November 26, 2002 (bear with me if the wayback machine is slow). Then look at it as it appeared on December 5, 2003. And again on November 30, 2004. And again on April 1, 2005. And now look at it today.

Let's take a few examples. Have a look at PostSecret. It is the #3 site on the Technorati Top 100 today, with over 12,000 sites that have linked to it in the last 180 days. It didn't even exist on the chart in April of 2005. Or look at The Huffington Post. It is #5 on the Top 100. It too, didn't exist on the chart in April of 2005. Or look at the #47 blog in April, 2005 Baghdad Burning. This blog still is regularly posting, but has fallen to #304.

This should not be meant to imply that there are no network effects, or that a power law relationship doesn't exist in the Blogosphere. Of course there are network effects. But I want to go a level or two deeper than just thinking about the blogosphere as an A-List and The Long Tail -- for that's far too simplistic, and leaves out some of the most interesting blogs and bloggers out there.

The Magic Middle

This realm of publishing, which I call "The Magic Middle" of the attention curve, highlights some of the most interesting and influential bloggers and publishers that are often writing about topics that are topical or niche, like Chocolate and Zucchini on food, Wi-fi Net News on Wireless networking, TechCrunch on Internet Companies, Blogging Baby on parenting, Yarn Harlot on knitting, or Stereogum on music - these are blogs that are interesting, topical, and influential, and in some cases are radically changing the economics of trade publishing.

At Technorati, we define this to be the bloggers who have from 20-1000 other people linking to them. As the chart above shows, there are about 155,000 people who fit in this group. And what is so interesting to me is how interesting, exciting, informative, and witty these blogs often are. I've noticed that often these blogs are more topical or focused on a niche area, like gardening, knitting, nanotech, mp3s or journalism and a great way to find them has been through Blog Finder.

Explore: Dealing with Information Overload

Given that there's a lot of interesting topical posts by influential or authoritative bloggers in those topic areas, we formulated an idea: Why not use these authoritative bloggers as a new kind of editorial board? Watch what they do, what they post about, and what they link to as input to a new kind of display - a piece of media that showed you the most interesting posts and conversations that related to a topic area, like food, or technology, or politics, or PR. The idea is to use the bloggers that know the most about an area or topic to help spot the interesting trends that may never hit the "A-list". We call this new section Explore, and we've seeded it with some of the most interesting topics that we could find. But one of the nice things about Explore is that there are no gatekeepers, and that anyone who writes interesting topical blog posts can get included simply by tagging his blog and tagging his posts.

It's still pretty new, and occasionally an irrelevant post or two sneaks into the display. We're working on fixing that, but one of the new features we're launching today is the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of any explore category, so you can now read the most interesting posts via your favorite newsreader.

These middle tier blogs also define communities of interest in the blogosphere. Its easy to think of the blogosphere as a cacophony of voices spread out over a big long tail distribution. But Blog Finder and Explore help resolve these thousands of blogs into topical, relevant communities of interest that interlink, refer to one another and often wrestle with ideas, discuss them and move them along. People often ask, "what blogs should I read?" And often times a good answer is, "you should read the posts from the leading blogs in topics that of interest you. Blog Finder and Explore make this possible for the first time on a wide variety of topics--- and in so doing we hope will the blgosphere more approachable, useful, and comprehensible to more people than ever before.

Filter By Authority: Giving YOU the power to tune your searches

There's one more big feature that I wanted to write about tonight, our new Filter By Authority feature. You can see this on all keyword search results pages, looking like this:

Clicking on the green slider allows you to easily refine your search results to show greater or fewer matching blog posts. For some searches, you might want to pick and choose only posts from blogs that have been around a while and are highly influential - so pick "a lot of authority" as shown above. I've found this great for searches on highly trafficked topics, like "George Bush" or Olympics, or on topics that are known to get a lot of spam, like mortgage or refinance. I find that it often helps me to also answer the question, "Who is the most influential blogger talking about XXX this week, and what did she say?"

Clicking lower on the slider gives you the ability to see how different levels of filtering affect your search results. For my ego feeds, I always want to see every single mention, so I turn off filtering for those feeds. I also love looking at the charts on the left-hand side of each search result to see what changes when I change the filter, too.

As we implemented this feature, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to name it. We frequently use the term authority on our site when we talk about inbound links, as in "a link is a vote of authority." So to maintain consistency we called this new feature, " sort by authority." But in no way should this imply a value judgment. More authority doesn't necessarily mean more good or more interesting. In many instances, less authority yields more interesting results: a greater diversity of opinion, less mainstream thinking, more individual voices. The authority filter is a tool to fine tune results, and its a great way to zoom in on the voices that are commanding the most attention, and then zoom back out and listen to the whole diverse medium that is the blogosphere. With so many voices we're happy to add a new tuning control!

This new feature is a beta feature, so we're looking for your feedback! Do you like it? Find it useful? Or is it confusing? What about the name? We tried a number of different names for the feature, but ended up picking "filter by authority" since we speak about a blogger's authority as being based on the number of links he gets from other people, but it isn't a perfect analogy. In the end, we decided that rather than having the perfect name, we'd much rather get the feature out there for all of you to try, and we'd listen intently to your feedback and comments.

In Summary

• Blogging and Mainstream Media continue to share attention in blogger's and reader's minds, but bloggers are climbing higher on the "big head" of the attention curve, with some bloggers getting more attention than sites including Forbes, PBS, MTV, and the CBC.
• Continuing down the attention curve, blogs take a more and more significant position as the economics of the mainstream publishing models make it cost prohibitive to build many nice sites and media
• Bloggers are changing the economics of the trade magazine space, with strong entries covering WiFi, Gadgets, Internet, Photography, Music, and other nice topic areas, making it easier to thrive, even on less aggregate traffic.
• There is a network effect in the Technorati Top 100 blogs, with a tendency to remain highly linked if the blogger continues to post regularly and with quality content.
• Looking at the historical data shows that the inertia in the Top 100 is very low - in other words, the number of new blogs jumping to the top of the Top 100 as well as he blogs that have fallen out of the top 100 show that the network effect is relatively weak.
• The Magic Middle is the 155,000 or so weblogs that have garnered between 20 and 1,000 inbound links. It is a realm of topical authority and significant posting and conversation within the blogosphere.
• Technorati Explore is a new feature that uses the authoritative topical bloggers as a distributed editorial team, highlighting the most interesting blog posts and links in over 2,500 categories.
• The new Filter By Authority slider makes it easy to refine a search and look for either a wider array of thoughts and opinions, or to narrow the search to only bloggers that have lots of other people linking to them. This gives you the power to decide how much filtering you want.

State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth

State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth

It's been 4 months since last October's State of the Blogosphere report, so it's time to update the numbers! For historical perspective, you can see earlier State of the Blogosphere reports from July 2005, from March 2005, and from October 2004.

The State of the Blogosphere is Strong.

OK, I'm paraphrasing from a more famous speech that happened last week, but the truth is that the blogosphere continues to grow at a quickening pace. Technorati currently tracks 27.2 Million weblogs, and the blogosphere we track continues to double about every 5.5 months, as the chart below shows:

The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago.

New blog creation continues to grow. We currently track over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day - and 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. In other words, even though there's a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging is growing as a habitual activity. In October of 2005, when Technorati was only tracking 19 million blogs, about 10.4 million bloggers were still posting 3 months after the creation of their blogs.

In addition to that, about 2.7 million bloggers update their blogs at least weekly. Here's a chart of the number of new blogs created each day, from January 2004 to January 2006:

Dealing with Spam

There has been an increase in the overall noise level in the blogosphere, most notably in the number of spam and fake pings that are sent - what I call "spings". These spam pings are fake or bogus notifications that a blog has been updated; in some cases, these spings can amount to a denial-of-service attack, and can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total pings Technorati receives. However, we've built a sophisticated system that mitigates the spings, and helps to keep spam blogs out of our indexes. Beyond that, about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated, or are attempts to create link farms or click fraud. Technorati continues to take an ecosystem approach to solving this problem, working closely with other players like Amazon, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Drupal, Google, MSN, Six Apart, Tucows, Wordpress and Yahoo, and there will be another Web 2.0 Spam Squashing Summit this spring, building on the success of the previous two summits.

A News Cycle Measured in Megahertz

Moving beyond spam, the number of people reaching out and reaching each other continues to grow. Daily Posting Volume tracked by Technorati continues to grow, and the blogosphere also reacts to world events. I've pointed out a number of the spikes in posting volume that have accompanied major news events in the chart below of posting volume:

We track about 1.2 Million posts each day, which means that there are about 50,000 posts each hour. At that rate, it is literally impossible to read everything that is relevant to an issue or subject, and a new challenge has presented itself - how to make sense out of this monstrous conversation, and how to find the most interesting and authoritative information out there.

The Continued Rise of Tagging

In January 2005, Technorati launched its tagging service, based on the rel=tag microformat, which is a simple way for bloggers to categorize their posts, and to make it easy for people to find interesting posts on a given subject. Today, we have tracked over 81 Million posts with tags or categories - and over 400,000 new tagged posts are created every day. The chart below shows the immense growth of tagging in the past year:

Tags for Blogs

There was still a major problem, however - how to easily find the most interesting blogs on the subjects that you cared about. So, in September 2005, Technorati launched Blog Finder, a tags-based way for people to find the most authoritative blogs on a particular subject, allowing bloggers to tag their blogs into the categories that they felt were most relevant for themselves. In 4 months, over 850,000 blogs have been put into Blog Finder, making it the most comprehensive directory of blogs on the web. Over 2,500 categories have already attracted a critical mass of influential bloggers writing about them, from Politics and Technology to Gardening or Erotica. And more are created every day, making it easier for people to find the most interesting blogs in the topics they care about.

In summary:

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers