In this post, I quoted Bigwig (from the comments in a related post):
[Y]ou need to factor in the age of the blog, as well. Those lists tend to grow over time.
I responded:
[O]nce a weblog is established (however that may be defined), as those in the MBE would seem to be, I see no reason to expect that the ratio of ingoing-to-outgoing links will necessarily increase over time. At an extreme, while InstaPundit may be reluctant to add more links, new websites like mine will continue to link to him. But are most established sites close to that extreme?
(If this article, New Poll Shows Correlation Is Causation is correct, Bigwig was right.)
From the most recent iteration of the Myelin Blogosphere Ecosystem (MBE), for 50 randomly-chosen blogs (I'm working on the rest), I gathered, in addition to the number of outgoing links, the date of the first post I could find. (This is the best proxy I could find for blog-age, though a few sites tend to move and lose archives).
I then estimated the relationship between the number of incoming links and (i) the number of outgoing links and (ii) the relative age of the blog compared to the average age for the 50 on which I've gathered data. The number of outgoing links is statistically significant at the 99% level, and the relative blog-age is much more statistically significant. These variables alone explain about 66% of the variation in the number of incoming links for these 50 blogs. Each outgoing link is worth about 0.9 incoming links for these blogs, and each year in existence beyond the average of 1.4 years for these sites is worth another 142 incoming links (or an additional link every four days).
This is getting interesting. Thanks for the idea, Bigwig.
Posted by oscarjr at February 11, 2003 11:44 PM | TrackBack