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November 20, 2007, 03:40 PM ET
The Quick and the Blogged
If you’re busy watching over your campus network or trying to earn tenure, then you probably haven’t carved out much time for keeping up with blog chatter. But what if someone were to hand you a list of the 100 blogs that seem to have covered big Web news before anyone else? Tempted yet?
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have produced just such a list. A team led by Carlos Guestrin, an assistant professor of computer science and machine learning, scanned about 45,000 blogs and ran them through an algorithm that measures how information propagates. (The same algorithm can be used to detect contamination in water-supply systems, the researchers say.)
If nothing else, the study shows that conservative politics has found a home on the Web — and that conservative bloggers are skilled at spreading news. Four of the top five blogs — including Web titans like Instapundit and Michelle Malkin and lesser-known sites like Watcher of Weasels — are right-leaning. A pair of liberal blogs, Modulator and Eschaton, check in lower in the top 10.
It’s worth noting, though, that Carnegie Mellon’s blogroll wouldn’t actually make for an especially well-rounded reading list. Not only are political blogs dominant, but a few sites that are no longer being updated — like Science and Politics, the No. 3 blog — made the cut. “How useful it is to rank blogs according to the 2006 data anyway?” asked Bora Zivkovic, that blog’s author, after learning that his defunct blog had been singled out by the Carnegie Mellon team. “That is eons ago in Internet time.” —Brock Read
Categories: Research
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