Some enterprising grad students in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University just released a tasty little tidbit entitled “Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks.” The authors pose a simple question: Which blogs should one read to be most up to date, i.e., to quickly know about important stories that propagate over the blogosphere? Well, believe it or not, these (brilliant) researchers concluded that if you could only read 100 blogs to stay up to date, our humble site ought to be one of them!
The methodolgy as presented in the equation-laden research paper appears anything but simple. However, the desired characteristics included number of posts of a blog in 2006, number of inlinks from other blogs inside the dataset, number of outlinks to other blogs in the dataset, and number of all outlinks. Put all that good stuff in a algorithmic blender and out comes 10,000 Birds at #53 on the list. It should come as no surprise that we’re joined by fairly phenomenal company. Most of the big time political blog pundits, both progressive and conservative, are there, as are a plethora of blog celebrities, luminaries, aggregators, and miscreants, though I’m not naming names. I will point out that, while the bioblogosphere seems woefully underrepresented, the SEED Scienceblog collective made the list; they just happened to come in 45 spots below us!
I fail to see true value in this scattershot compilation but, then again, I’m not a genius in the Carnegie Mellon computer science department. If you want to be the first to know about critical news with many, many people coming in the cascade after you, you should definitely play it safe and subscribe to 10,000 Birds!
While I don’t endorse many of the blogs on this list, I will, in the interest of community, completeness, and karma, present the Top 100 blogs (for unit cost case and PA objective function) for your discerning consideration:
Congratulations, Mike.
It’s a very different list from the Technorati Top 100, which only measures recent inbound links. I think this one is much more representative of the diversity of the blogosphere.
very cool for sure!! An extra high-five for being one step up from O’Reilly Radar!!
It takes alogry… alorgo… alogrhyth… fancy calculations to let the rest of the world know what we regulars have long known. Congrats Mike, Charlie and Corey
Thanks for the kind comments, but I really ought to point out that all the data is based on 2006 – long before Corey and me joined 10,000 Birds: this recognition was all down to Mike’s solo efforts (which he’d be far too modest to say himself).
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Yeah, but did your traffic go up?