Blogosphere News

What's the fastest growing segment of the blogosphere?

(Click on "more" for the answer.)

Iraqi dentists, of course!

Carnival of the Capitalists

In the original introduction to Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman wrote:

This book discusses some of these great issues. Its major theme is the role of competitive capitalism -- the organization of the bulk of economic activity through private enterprise operating in a free market -- as a system of economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom.

I've long thought that many in the blogosphere focused on the latter at the expense of the former. A welcome corrective, debuting today, is the Carnival of the Capitalists, a venture jointly initiated by BusinessPundit Rob and Verbose Jay Solo. (A list of future hosts of the Carnival and additional detail can be found here.) As the Carnival of the Vanities highlights some of the self-selected best blog-writing, this Carnival aims to do the same for writing on "business, management, marketing, accounting, finance, economics, sales, capitalism."

The first edition of the Carnival contains an impressive 23 entries. I hope any readers will pay it a visit and consider contributing in the future. Consider it necessary for freedom, and happy reading!

The Wages of Blogging

The neatest thing I read today: vacationing in Manhattan, LCDR (Select) and Mrs. Smash had dinner with Peggy Noonan. Excerpt:

I thought that I was having dinner with someone famous. What a treat! But it turns out that I was telling the stories and answering the questions. She even brought her teenage son. Why? Because he wanted to meet me. Because he is, in her words, “a fan.”

I have fans? Why? I’m just an ordinary guy!

But that’s really it, isn’t it? I’m an ordinary guy, who was sent to a war zone. My war was, relatively speaking, boring and uneventful. But I wrote about it, people read it, and now I’m some sort of anonymous celebrity.

I'm very envious. Congratulations to LCDR Smash!

Another Blogs around the World Sampler

The terrifying thing in all this chaos is that ordinary Zimbabweans have become so engulfed in their struggle for daily survival that they either don't know or just shrug their shoulders when you talk about the national disaster. For over two months The Daily News, the only independent daily newspaper in Zimbabwe has been banned by militant youths in towns like Marondera. People didn't know that this week it became illegal to keep large amounts of your own money in places other than banks. They didn't know that police have now been given powers to stop and physically search you in the streets if they think you are carrying large amounts of bank notes. How much more obscene can things get? Can you believe that you can actually be stopped, frisked and have your own money "confiscated" from you in the street?

@Zimbabwe News

Immediately you enter Saudi Arabia from the Bahrain/Saudi causeway you notice the heightened state of alert that the security forces are at. There are multiple manned check-points. Fortunately they didn't delay traffic that much. The sneaky thing about those check-points is that they are doubled up as speed traps as well! Fortunately I wasn't nabbed. The "etiquette of the road" in Saudi as is with other countries I guess is that the traffic from the other side warn you by constantly flashing their headlights for about 2km from the check-point, hence everyone just went at or below the speed limit!

I was only in Riyadh for a couple of hours for two meetings, so I didn't get a chance to speak to a lot of people, but from the people who I did speak with, they are well aware of this heightened security issue and the collective opinion amongst them is to rid Saudi of these extremists once and for all. They seem to enjoy no sympathy at least from the educated and business classes. While I was in Riyadh apparently there was a general terror alert going on, which explained the inordinate security measures I encountered.

@Mahmood's Den

Our other adventure for the day consisted of dinner at the Iranian truck stop. We’d heard the Persian food there was good, and it was pretty much the only non-Turkmen restaurant in Ashgabat we hadn’t tried yet. You get sick of the options here pretty quickly, so we have been meaning to try the Iranian truck stop for a while. Kir had been told that it was on the side of the road that goes to the Iranian border. We were expecting some version of a truck stop, much like the places they have on the road from Samarqand to Bokhara – long tables, your choice of rice or noodles, and cutlery delivered with your food. Instead, what we found on the side of the road was a gated complex that included a hotel, a mosque, garages, and a restaurant, all tiled to low like down-market versions of old Persian monuments, and landscaped with masses of roses and beds of grass.

The signage was all in Farsi, but we located the restaurant next to a small mosque. When we got in, a friendly Turkmen woman explained that they had no food today except for shashlik (shish kebab), soup, and salads. We’d come that far, though, so we decided to stay and have the shashlik. I was halfway through my fanta when the rice arrived. We hadn't ordered rice, but it must have been the side dish for the shashlik order. Two plates of rice. Perfect heaps of rice, with saffron on top, a little dried fruit, and a pat of butter. The smell brought me back to my childhood, and the rice that Zed used to make for our family dinners. Its flavor was so absolutely right - the screaming epitome of rice – that it very nearly brought tears to my eyes. I had forgotten I could even feel that way about food. I was worried that after the rice the meat would be anti-climatic, but it was really quite perfect.

@Central Asia Central

A Blogs around the World Sampler

Whistling Thorns is a place literally in the middle of nowhere. But, you get pretty good pizzas there.

It lies on the pipeline road that connects the highway to Tanzania with the road to lake magadi. Kinda like connecting two points without a name on the map with a straight line. With the workhorse Pug 504 loaded up we made good speed. While a bitch in city traffic, the Pug is a master of the Kenyan highway. This arrow straight-road passes through savannah of the Tsavo eco-system. There aren't many people living here, traffic on the road is practically non-existent.

@Unganisha.org

We were discussing Naadam and she confessed that she finds Mongolian wrestling boring. I admitted that I'm not too crazy about cricket, my beloved country's national sport, which is as much of an acquired taste as Mongolian wrestling. I think it would take as long to understand the rules of cricket as it would to understand those of Mongol wrestling. Then we got onto the Mongolian diet. She started explaining how eating mutton and fat and dough in winter, and yoghurt and curd and milk in summer, leads to a long life, it being a perfectly balanced diet.

@chris in mongolia

One old tradition in Ukraine is to greet guests w/ an elaborate loaf of bread with pretty decorations on top and salt, both of which the guests eat. We were entertained by the musical stylings of one of the host mothers who performs Ukrainian folk songs with a group while wearing traditional embroidered dress. I kept thinking how we had traveled so far and how we were now, I don't know, rewarded for our efforts. Not so much by the food and music, but rather from all the effort that these people make for us. It is so hard still to fathom that these people take us in as strangers and treat us as honored guests, all on no merit of our own. I am humbled every day to be here, to be treated as I am. We are tremendously privileged to have this opportunity and I thank especially the American taxpayers for supporting us.

Much merriment, toasting and drinking of homemade wine and vodka ensued, from which I already have a headache (the wine, not the merriment per se). There may have also been dancing to loud Ukrainian traditional songs translated to pop music and a poor rendition sung of "America the Beautiful" but I will never tell our cluster's secrets.

@Peace Corps || Ukraine

To write with such casualness is not to condone such behaviour. Nor is it to condemn it. It is simply to acknowledge a particular national trait, birthed in our colonial past. It is a phenomenon at once both simple and complex, one that still holds strong, even in this anodyne, politically correct age. In essence it has to do with the harsh colonial mentality of not allowing anyone else dignity, of seeing everyone as being in the same leaky boat as yourself. Since no one was exempt from being lampooned - not even the white masters - the result was that, in the main, and once you weren't being genuinely offensive, no one's pride was damaged. In any case, there was no such thing as racial pride to be damaged. No solid notion of racial consciousness had as yet been formed.

Of course, now we're up to our ears in racial pride - almost exclusively African and Indian - which has more to do with politics than it does with any genuine concern for ancestral heritage. But peel away that flimsy layer and beneath is the true Trinidadian, who, regardless of his race, and whether he wishes to admit it, or even if he doesn't realise it, is the same as everyone else: a Creole.

@Notes from a small island

Last night Norbert made his return in spectacular fashion. For those of you who might not remember or didn't read my email about the critters in my house, Norbert is the foot-long green gecko that lives in my fale.

So last night, while I was struggling to get to sleep in the middle of the night about 3am or so, I heard this huge crashing sound in the kitchen. I get up, walk over 10 feet to the kitchen and turn on the lights.

What do I see?

The first thing is the glass top of my stock pot, which is on the floor. Fortunately it's in one piece. Then I see my kittens. Mak is on the screen door and Filemu is on top of the fridge. They're looking up in the corner. Up in the corner is, of course, Norbert.

@American Idle

My point being...get over yourselves already! Not everything that happens in Latin America is the result of some plot hatched in a smoky room at the State Dept., y'know? Learn to deal: there was going to be a coup in Chile anyway - because whatever the CIA might have been up to, a huge swathe of Chilean society and almost all of the military supported it. CIA connnivance sure didn't hurt, but for the love of christ, what kind of catatonically self-involved view of the world puts a little CIA logistical and financial help at the center of the analysis, while showing no interest at all in the psychology of rampant fear that took over the Chilean middle class, its order and progress ideology, its deep catholic roots, and its cultural ascendancy over the military? Is it really that difficult, or boring, for you to stop thinking about your own damn country for five minutes and consider the internal dynamics of the societies you're purportedly interested in? Because, you see, these kinds of questions strongly suggest that you're not actually interested in Latin America at all! You're just using Latin America as a screen on which to project your little ideological anti-US-imperialism circle jerk. Enough!

@Caracas Chronicles

Quantifying the Blogosphere: The Value of a Link for Everyone Else?

In two earlier posts (here and here), I looked at the relationship between weblogs' traffic and the associated number of inbound links. Tonight, I look at the same relationship, but exclude from the analysis the top 25 most-visited weblogs in N.Z. Bear's sample with open Sitemeter statistics as of July 7, 2003. (These 25 websites account for almost exactly 2/3rd of all traffic for this sample of blogs.)

Once again, I find a highly statistically significant relationship between inbound links and traffic. However, for this sample of blogs each inbound link is correlated with an additional 2.3 visits per day, as compared to the 12 visits per day for the entire sample of blogs. This discrepancy may provide some evidence that, as Professor Volokh noted, traffic may cause links, or some other factor may cause both traffic and links.

For this smaller sample of 626 weblogs, controlling for the number of inbound links, I find that the number of months a blog has been in existence is positively correlated with the number of daily visits. Each additional month of blog-age is correlated with an additional 3.4 daily visits. This supports CGHill's suggested inertial effect.

Finally, after removing the most-visited sites and controlling for the number of inbound links and blog-age, I find that sites on BlogSpot are correlated with statistically significantly fewer daily visits (25 fewer visits per day) than sites hosted elsewhere. (The BlogSpot sites in the top 25 are: Eschaton (Atrios), Dave Barry's Blog, Howard Dean 2004, TBogg and Merde in France.)

Note that, for the full sample of blogs, these three variables "explain" 62% of the
variation in traffic; for this smaller sample, the corresponding number is only 43%.

For what it's worth...

Blogosphere Traffic Concentration

On Outside the Beltway, James Joyner has a look at N.Z. Bear's weblog traffic statistics and comments on the amount of traffic concentrated on the top blogs. (Clay Shirky wrote here on traffic concentration.)

Here's what the data looked like as of July 7, 2003:

As of that date (with Instapundit's traffic understated due to his vacation), the total average daily traffic of the top 10 sites (109,707 visits) exceeded that of the 671 other sites (102,500 visits).

Here's the cumulative amount of total traffic accounted for by each of the top 200 blogs. As noted, the top 10 account for more than 50% of all traffic. The top 50 account for more than 75% of all traffic and the top 200 shown here account for more than 92% of all traffic.

A View from the Top of the Blogosphere

The following chart shows the relationship between actual and predicted traffic for the top 25 blogs in N.Z. Bear's sample. For background, see here.

I've excluded from this sample the statistics for the site Detling House Memories, as I've been unable to verify the Sitemeter statistic and the visit-to-link ratio of 3,600 seems out-of-whack. If this exclusion is justified, I will need to re-do the numbers below to reflect this change. Argh! (N.Z. Bear?).

The sites for which the blue line tops the grey line are, in my parlance, "readers' blogs." Those in the opposite situation are "bloggers' blogs."

A Quantifying the Blogosphere Critique

In a comment to the post below, Dean Esmay wrote:

I believe I have found a profound error in Truth Laid Bear's site statistics ranking which may render your data questionable. I'm going to write something up about it tonight.

Dean's thoughtful post is now up here.

He identifies as a possible issue the fact that Sitemeter only counts traffic to pages on which its code is placed. In his case, he only included the code on his main page (i.e., not on his individual or archived pages). He notes that, due to this, Sitemeter failed to count 63% of his traffic.

If many of the other sites included also count only visits to their main page, this could have the effect of skewing the analysis. As a quick check, I chose 10 blogs at random from the sample and checked whether Sitemeter was included on their archive pages. In all 10 cases, they were. (This is hardly dispositive, but I do have to get to work.) Thus, if this sample is representative, the traffic-counting issue may be less of a problem than Dean feared.

Dean also wrote:

His analysis is interesting, because he believes there are some blogs which are "blogger's blogs" (mainly only read by other bloggers) versus "popular blogs" that are read more by the masses. Unfortunately, while I am certain there is some truth to this, I'm not convinced we have enough data to be basing any firm conclusions upon.

I would characterize "bloggers' blogs" and "readers' blogs" slightly differently. The former, like my site, are relatively over-linked given their readership, the latter, relatively under-linked. (Alternatively, the former are relatively under-read given the generosity of their linkers...) Of late, most of my readers have been Google™ searchers rather than other bloggers. Not that I blame the other bloggers...

In any event, thanks to Dean Esmay for pointing out the issue and for linking to the analysis.

Update: James Joyner also has an unsurprisingly insightful post on the topic.

Quantifying the Blogosphere: The Value of a Link? II

In an earlier post on this topic, I looked at 91 sites on my blogroll that had open Sitemeter statistics. I found that an an inbound link is correlated with 11 additional visits per day. One might believe that links cause visits, or, as Professor Volokh noted in an email quoted in the linked post, that visits cause links or that some third factor causes both links and visits. (New Poll Shows Correlation Is Causation.) Data are not currently available to test which of these hypotheses are correct, though I'm hoping they will be soon.

Thanks to the amazing N.Z. Bear, I now have both traffic statistics and the number of inbound links for 682 weblogs (excluding identifiable duplicates). Of those 682 sites, I've been able to identify approximate first-post dates for 651. Some of these are likely to be inaccurate for blogs that have moved and neither imported their earlier posts nor linked to their earlier incarnation(s). (Dean Esmay's Blogspot Jihad was a boon to readers, but made this research somewhat more difficult.) I've also identified which of the 682 sites are hosted on the much-lamented BlogSpot servers.

In a comment on the post linked above, CGHill of Dustbury fame hypothesized an inertial effect, i.e., that visits are correlated with blog-age. As a first result, I looked at the correlation between blogs' age and traffic. On average, each month a site has been in existence is correlated with a (statistically significant) additional 26 daily average visits. So there's some preliminary support for this theory.

Next, I looked again at the correlation between inbound links and traffic. I find that each inbound link is correlated with a very statistically significant additional 12 visits per day. (This is similar to the 11 visits per day I found in the earlier analysis. The increase may be explained by the increased popularity of weblogs over the last couple of months.) If it can be shown that links cause visits, the number of inbound links alone explains 60% of the variation among blogs in the number of visits.

Adding blog-age to the analysis, I find that each inbound link is is again correlated with 12 additional visits per day and each month in existence is correlated with a statistically significant 15 fewer visits per day. Negative inertia?

Finally, I looked at the relationship between daily traffic, inbound links and whether or not a site was hosted on BlogSpot. Again, each inbound link was correlated with 12 additional daily visits. Sites on BlogSpot received a statistically significant 171 fewer visits per day than those hosted elsewhere. However, it's fairly common for sites to mature and be moved off BlogSpot (the "training wheels" phenomenon). Adding blog-age to the analysis, I find that, once again, inbound links are correlated with 12 additional visits per day, each month in existence is correlated with 14 fewer visits per day, and sites on BlogSpot receive a statistically insignificant 60 fewer visits per day.

The sites with the highest traffic given their age and number of inbound links ("readers' bloggers") are Gizmodo, Instapundit, Tom Tomorrow, Eschaton (Atrios) and Daily Kos. On the other hand, the "bloggers' bloggers'" are The Truth Laid Bear, A Small Victory, IMAO (I expect this might speed-up the delinking process.), VodkaPundit and Outside the Beltway.

In this post, OTB's James Joyner express surprise that his traffic appeared uncorrelated with the number of inbound links to his site. If links cause visits, my overdue explanation is that, at present, he's a "bloggers' blogger."

For what it's worth, my site is also very much of a bloggers' blog, receiving a rather-astounding 600 fewer daily visits than would be predicted. Thanks for all of the links, folks. Hopefully, the readership will follow...

I was going to post a few mildly interesting (to me, at least) charts of some of the underlying data, but this post is already too long. Perhaps I'll put them up in the days to come.

Your feedback is eagerly sought.

Quantifying the Blogosphere, Preview II

I'm still working on the updated Quantifying the Blogosphere analysis discussed below. In addition to N.Z. Bear's daily visit statistics, I've now gathered (NZB's) inbound link data and approximate first-post dates for 680 of the 712 blogs.

For these 680 sites, the mean blog-age is 11 months, and the median age is 9 months. 35% of the sites are younger than mine. Between June 1998 and June 2003, the month that saw the most new blogs was February 2003.

Here's the distribution of sites by blog-age:

For the entire sample, 52% of the blogs are on BlogSpot. However, for the top 100 most visited sites (with open SiteMeter statistics), only 23% use BlogSpot.

Please note that there are a substantial number of duplicates in these data. Once I'm done cleaning them up (to the extent that I can), I'll post the full analysis. I hope it will be interesting.

Departures

As others have pointed out, Page and Media Minded have given up on this hobby. I am grateful to Page for linking to my humble site in its early days.

Thanks, Page.

I don't pretend to understand. My best wishes to you both.

Quantifying the Blogosphere, A Preview

Thanks to the very clever N.Z. Bear, I am working on an update to this Quantifying the Blogosphere post in which I looked at the correlation between the number of incoming links and daily blog visits.

In that post, I looked at 91 sites on my blogroll with publicly-available Sitemeter statistics. N.Z. Bear has now automated the gathering of such statistics, offering them for 712 sites (including some duplicates).

In response to a comment by CGHill, I am also incorporating blog-age into the analysis. For each of the blogs on NZB's list, I've attempted to identify the earliest post on the site. (These data are somewhat tainted by Dean Esmay's BlogSpot Jihad, as many of the sites he helped to move off BlogSpot neither imported earlier posts nor linked to the BlogSpot weblog.)

For what it's worth, for the first 426 sites on the Bear's list, the average blog is 12 months old, and the median weblog is 10 months old. 28% of them are younger than my site.

In case anyone is interested, I expect to post more details on the analysis in the next few days.

Blogosphere Daily News

N.Z. Bear has another great project in the works, The Blogosphere Daily News. He (or, more specifically, his program) tallies up and summarizes the most linked blog posts, other media pieces, and images in a very attractive format. It's currently a beta version, but it looks great already.

I hope he'll keep an archive of each day's edition. What a useful resource this looks to be. That Bear's a genius.

Weblog News

Thanks in part to kind links from Bigwig and Jay Solo, I've received lots of suggestions for the Blogs around the U.S.A. and Blogs around the World projects.

I haven't had time to look at all the suggested sites yet, but I expect to post a large update to the former and a small update to the latter this weekend. Thanks to everyone who submitted suggestions. As always, more are sought via comment or email.

In addition, Bigwig has an interesting Quantifying the Blogosphere post on average daily reading time for his and various other weblogs. As several readers pointed out in the comments, the Sitemeter statistic used is difficult to interpret.

Why do some of my visitors have visit lengths of 0:00?

That means the visitors are only staying to view a single page and then leaving. The only way that Site Meter knows how long someone is on a site is by the times of each page view. If they only look at a single page and then leave, we don't know how long they looked at the page. If they looked at two pages and left we would know they at least were on the site during the time of the first page view and the second page view. The difference between those two times would be the length of the visit.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that if readers behave consistently across weblogs, the statistic is still interesting. For what it's worth, this site averages 3.15 hours of (measured) reader time per day.

Weblog Comment Hall of Fame

I don't receive many comments here. To date, there have been 231 comments on 223 posts, testament, no doubt, to the quality of my writing and the general interest in my chosen subject matter.

Later tonight, Tim Blair will bemoan the wretched humourlessness of the leftists who comment on his site. Excerpt:

It’s usually little trouble to locate a counter-stereotype; a black nerd, say, or a spendthrift Scot. A lazy Chinese student. A polite English shop assistant. A charismatic Belgian, a warlike Frenchman, a quiet Italian - they’re all out there.

But can someone please find me a leftist with a [] working sense of humour and direct this unique being to my comment boards? The current lefty voices here are almost parodies of the modern “don’t run with scissors” socialist.

While probably not universally true, it's a phenomenon I've noticed on many other sites.

In response, in a comment tomorrow morning, an apparent non-leftist will type:

There aren't any hard left-wingers with a sense of humor because you can't not take yourself too seriously while laboring under the weight of a towering delusion of moral superiority. This is a rule of nature.

Chuckle. There should be some way to honor the best commenters around the Blogosphere, those that truly add to the weblog-reading experience by sharing their knowledge, perspective and/or humor. As there are weblog awards bestowed (none, to my knowledge, particularly link-worthy), perhaps there should be a Commenter Hall of Fame or Comment Award Ceremony or something.

CGHill and Bigwig are prolific commenters (and bloggers). They are frequently insightful and amusing. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, they were the first to comment on this humble site. Among bloggers, I would nominate both of them.

Perhaps because it receives so many comments, LGF is the source of many of my favorites. Frequent commenter (and now blogger) E. Nough is legendary therein. (Or is it thereon?)

In a single post today, LGF features these two laugh-out-loud comments by Glen Wishard and this one by Iowahawk. Both are fairly representative of their input in general. Frequent commenter Donna V. (at LGF and elsewhere) would also get a nomination from me.

Daily Pundit also receives a large number of enjoyable comments. Of the writers, the first I would nominate is the knowledgeable professor John© (a/k/a John@).

This is by no means a complete list of my favorites, just the first handful of names that came to mind. If any reader is interested enough to submit nominations (no self-nominations here, please), maybe I'll turn this into another Crazy Oscar Jr. Blog-Project.™

There may be a poll involved.

Armavirumque

Armavirumque, The New Criterion's weblog, is now active.

Daily Local News Scandal

Ken Layne admits to making up the "Daily Local News."

(Do read his fiction, though).

I expect the rabid-dog conservatives to add this non-scandal to the increasingly insane list of evidence against me and my tenure here at KenLayne.com.

I guess I might as well subscribe to the New York Times now.

Nah, I'll place my trust with ScrappleFace. As far as I know, he's neither admitted, nor been caught in, any "dishonesty" to date.

Quantifying the Blogosphere: The Value of a Link?

In an earlier post, I provided some evidence that the number of outgoing links on a site is correlated with the number of incoming links. What, then, is the value of an incoming link?

To attempt to answer this question, I gathered data on the number of average daily visits for 91 sites on my blogroll which have publicly-available Sitemeter statistics. For these 91, I also obtained the number of incoming links from the TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem (for sites that do not participate in TTLBBE, I obtained data from Technorati).

The answer, for this sample of blogs, is that an incoming link is correlated with an average of 11 additional visits per day (this result is highly statistically significant). There you have it.

Back in February, CGHill looked at Blogstreet data and formulated a metric he called Blog Overachievement Factor calculated for a given site as Blogstreet's Blog Rank divided by its Blog Importance Quotient. Dr. Weevil recently posted on the same metric, calling sites that are linked by relatively more important bloggers "bloggers' bloggers". (I think they might better be called "'important' bloggers' bloggers".)

However, stealing Dr. W's terminology, these new data may allow one to better identify "bloggers' bloggers" and "readers' bloggers".

Of the readers' bloggers, the foremost is famed puppy blender and freak of bloggy nature Glenn Reynolds who receives about 57,000 more daily visits than would be predicted by the number of links to his site.

Other sites with much greater readership than might be expected given the number of incoming links include: The Volokh Conspiracy, Daniel W. Drezner, Rachel Lucas, ScrappleFace, Dave Barry's Blog, L.T. Smash and The Command Post.

On the other hand, the bloggers' bloggers, with relatively high link-to-readership ratios, include: Silflay Hraka, Sine Qua Non Pundit, Eject! Eject! Eject!, Ken Layne, a small victory, Amish Tech Support and VodkaPundit.

(For what it's worth, this site receives about 23 fewer daily visits than would be predicted given the number of incoming links.)

If anyone else sends me their stats, I'll gladly add them to the analysis.

Update: Professor Volokh kindly and gently points out that my careless choice of words implied causation not in evidence:

Interesting correllation, but which way does the causation go? You say "The answer, for this sample of blogs, is that an incoming link is worth an average of 11 addition[]al visits per day (this result is highly statistically significant)," and the "worth" suggests that incoming links cause the visits. But perhaps the visits cause the links -- the more people visit a site, the more likely they are to link to it. Or maybe a third cause (e.g., how attractive the site is to people) causes both incoming links and visits, no?

(New Poll Shows Correlation Is Causation.)

Hence, I've replaced "worth" in the third paragraph with "correlated with". Testing causation is a project for another day.

Quantifying the Blogosphere: Monkey Usage

In a non-perma-linked comment (on the current second post -- Blogger permanent links misfire) on Silent Running, Wind Rider writes:

That's just to irritate Frank. I have no idea why he hates monkies so. If only he'd take my advice about broiling them with plenty of garlic and lots of butter, maybe he'd come around.

I think the current monkey-hatred has something to do with this, but monkeys are a recurring theme on IMAO.

In the interest of further quantifying the blogosphere, I decided to see if Frank posts about monkeys more than other bloggers. Using the magic of Google, I compared the frequency of monkey (or monkeys or monkies)-references on IMAO with that of this site and, chosen at random, Cato the Youngest.

Results:

This site: 3 monkeys/177 posts=1.7% monkey usage rate;
Cato the Youngest: 2 monkeys/911 posts=0.2% monkey usage rate;
IMAO: 43 monkeys/590 posts = 7.3% monkey usage rate.

Conclusion: Frank J. really hates monkeys. Of course, monkeys are funny, too.

Who's Puce?

Layne or Treacher?

Time for a scientific internet poll...

Blog Contest, Anyone?

Anyone want to hazard an educated guess as to which country will be the last to be assigned a blog in my Blogs around the World post?

Cuba? North Korea? Burma?

Okay, I Quit!

Via Random Jottings, I see that The New Criterion has a forthcoming blog. Naturally, it's called Armavirumque. (Why didn't I think of that?)

I wonder if Corner denizen John Derbyshire or blog-reader Mark Steyn had anything to do with this.

And does anyone start a blog without borrowing Instapundit's blogroll? They could, at least, borrow mine.

Quantifying the Blogosphere: A Preliminary and Sloppy Analysis of Readability

In tonight's attempt at quantifying the Blogosphere, I've gathered Microsoft Word's readability statistics for eleven blogs (ten popular, and mine). Of the popular blogs, five are written by professional writers (Daily Pundit, Dave Barry, Ken Layne, Matt Welch, and James Lileks), while five are not (The Volokh Conspiracy, Instapundit, Eschaton (Atrios), Silflay Hraka, and Dustbury.com).

I presume that Atrios is not a professional writer. In a sense, law professors (Instapundit and many of the Volokh conspirators) are professional writers, but their statistics were very different from those of the professionals listed above, so I left them separate.

According to this Hallmarks of Good Writing page:

Unless you are using passive voice for a specific purpose (e.g., to soften bad news, in certain scientific writing), try to keep the percentage of passive sentences less than about 5-10%. Why? Passive voice sentences (i.e., sentences in which the subject receives rather than performs the actions of the verb) are boring and lifeless. The grammar checking function in Word can help you find and fix sentences that contain passive voice verb forms.

The average percentage of passive-voice sentences in this sample is 7%. The average for the professional writers is 4%, and the average for the non-professionals (as I've categorized them) is 9%. (For what it's worth, the average for my site was 8%.) The professional writers ranged from 2% (Dave Barry) to 7% (Matt Welch), and the non-pros ranged from 6% (Instapundit) to 11% (Silflay Hraka and Atrios).

The same good-writing site notes:

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level measure computes readability based on the average number of syllables per word and the average number of words per sentence. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level indicates a grade-school level. For example, a score of 8.0 means that an eighth grader would understand the document. Standard writing approximately equates to the seventh-to-eighth-grade level. Try to keep your documents at about 12 or below.

The average Grade Level in this sample is 9.1. The average for the professional writers is 8.0, and the average for the non-professionals (as I've categorized them) is 10.2. (For what it's worth, the average for my site was 9.4.) The professionals ranged from 7.0 (Lileks) to 10.0 (Matt Welch), and the non-professionals ranged from 9.6 (Dustbury) to 11.4 (the Volokh gang).

I also note that the analysis of Bill Quick's blog includes its inline comments, perhaps biasing these results. However, there was only one comment on the page from Tony Foresta (no passive sentences, 7.0 Grade Level).

For this small sample of websites, there was no statistically significant relationship between Grade Level and the number of inbound links.

The small amount of overlap between these two samples is interesting (to me, at least). I hope to extend this analysis in the days to come.

Update: According to Microsoft Word, the statistics for this post are 0% passive sentences and 10.8 Grade Level. Given the amount of quotations I include here, I wonder if this is a more accurate measurement.

Update the update: I've been thinking about gathering these statistics for awhile now, but this post by CGHill:

30 March 2003 Ne plus ultra

Sooner or later, someone always asks: "So who's the best actual writer with a blog?"

Easy enough. I point to James Lileks, and quickly comes the demurral: "But he's, like, a professional."

In that case, the question becomes: "Who's the best writer with a blog who also has a non-writing day job?"

Still easy enough. This time I point to Bill Whittle.

It's an honor to be on the same continent as these guys.

and this comment on the post:

So, does being a professional somehow not make you a "real" writer? I know the average person has a warped idea about the value of scribes, but this is ridiculous... I guess we're in the same boat as all the allegedly overpaid pro athletes: we should all refuse paychecks and play simply for the love of the game. :)

Posted by CT at 4:34 PM, 30 March 2003

may have spurred me.

Bill Whittle's post linked by Mr. Hill contained 11% passive sentences and was at a 9.6 Grade Level, and I very much recommend it.

A. Beam of Mystery in Blogistan

Back in January, I posted on the mysterious nexus of Layne, Beam and Barry. Following Tuesday's celebration of Alex Beam day, my curiousity was renewed. Here's some of what Mr. Layne had to say on the subject yesterday:

And guess what? I figured out A. Beam's identity. He gave way too many clues to Cathy, and Brian lured him right into one of those cyber-traps you see on the teevee police dramas, and I ran his writing style through a couple of dozen Chomsky-Linguistics tests, and we had our man.

Or did we?

In Mr. Layne's comments, one sees the following:

My source tells me he's a corporate goon, who swallowed too many pills, and wound up nekkid on the beach, wondering if he wuz queer, or sumpthin'.

Posted by Jesus Ramirez at April 2, 2003 01:59 PM

Jesus! I resent that! I did not wind up nekkid on the beach! I was wearing a nice little thong set from Fredericks! A bit small, though.

Posted by a. beam at April 2, 2003 02:12 PM

Oh, and get back onto Layne's hard drive, Ramirez! We're all awaiting the Dot.Con sequel!

Posted by a. beam at April 2, 2003 02:13 PM

C'mon Layne, we discussed this a while back. He's not who you think he is, he's in a whole different state.

Posted by Matt Moore at April 2, 2003 03:27 PM

Say, Ken, since we both know who he is, do you think we should BLACKMAIL him???

Or at least torture him by dropping subtle hints now and then?

Posted by Cathy Seipp at April 2, 2003 05:45 PM

Dot Con, I say. So many clues!

What do you think, Page?

Name that Tune

Michele, of A Small Victory, dedicates a song to the fellow who inspired the Four Horsemen poster contest mentioned below.

Very catchy, too.

Four Horsemen of the Ablogalypse: Reynolds, Sullivan, Johnson, & Den Beste

Steven Den Beste chooses "Plague," and nominates Charles Johnson as "Famine," Andrew Sullivan as "War," and, of course, Glenn Reynolds as "Death."

Despite the fact that he was inexplicably omitted, Bill Quick is hosting the "Ablogalypse Poster Contest" today.

Here's my entry.

Yeah, it's lousy. I have no artistic skills.

Update: The original artwork can be found here.

A Preliminary, Less Preliminary and Shoddy Statistical Analysis of the Heights of the Blogosphere, Crediting Bigwig

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.

War of the Words

John Hawkins, proprietor of Right Wing News, hands out the First Annual Warblogger Awards. Laurence Simon is kind enough to share his voting record. Perhaps inexplicably, I was not sent a ballot. In the unlikely chance that there is a recount, here's how I would have voted (no slights intended to any of the other sites I regularly read -- you're on the blogroll for a reason):

Most Underrated Blog
I agree with the real voters here: Brothers Judd. I also find Rantburg underappreciated. And Juan Gato deserves to win something.

Best Unknown Blog
Dunno.

Favorite Editorial Writer Who's Not A Blogger
Mark Steyn.

Favorite Member Of The Bush Administration Other Than Bush
Rumsfeld.

Most Annoying Celebrity
Barbra Streisand

Most Annoying Blogger
Not applicable -- I don't read annoying blogs. I write them.

Most Overrated Blog
Mr. Hawkins does not allow for own-votes. Nonetheless, Oscar Jr.

Most Missed
I'd vote for Spoons, but he just posts in other bloggers' comments now, or Jeff Goldstein, but he still promises to return. Instead, my vote goes to Whigging Out, who really seems to be gone.

The Most Bloodthirsty Blog
I expected to vote for Dracula, but this doesn't seem so bloodthirsty:

I have no idea if I'm doing this correctly or not, No sense going any farther until I know for sure...

I guess I'll join Laurence in voting for The Rottweiler, Misha, instead.

Best Looking Blog
Little Green Footballs.

Best Group Blog
The Corner.

Best Non-American Blog
Tim Blair.

Best Female Blogger
Can I split my vote between Michele, of A Small Victory, and Rachel Lucas?

The Best Fisker
Misha, again.

The Funniest Blog
Scrappleface is always funny, but Frank J. of IMAO, both blood-thirsty and hilarious, gets my vote. He gets additional points for hating me.

Best Linker
Instapundit.

Best Original Content
USS Clueless. Runner-up, Eject! Eject! Eject!.

Best Blog Overall (5 selections)
1. Instapundit.
2. Daily Pundit.
3. Lileks.
4. LGF.
5. USS Clueless.

Quantifying Hraka

Since I'm home from the office early tonight, I think I'll try to post something.

In a comment, Bigwig of Silflay Hraka wrote:

So, what does this analysis predict for long, difficult to type and essentially meaningless blognames?

(I assume he was referring to his own site. If not, please ignore the rest of this post, but the answer then should be obvious.)

Actually, Silflay Hraka isn't long (13 characters vs. an average of 15), difficult to type (test your skills by clicking the link here) or meaningless (thanks to Bill Quick for pointing out the meaning, linked to here).

However, the Hraka-site was one of the inspirations for my analysis of the benefits of a big blogroll. When I first started reading the site, I could never remember how to spell "Silflay," so I would mouse my way over to Daily Pundit to track down the link. (This was before Instapundit added Bigwig to his blogroll, ignoring his less-prolific coauthors, as I've done in the Circle of Reciprocity).

Since Bigwig asked, this is what the preliminary and shoddy (and I mean it) analysis done to date says: given Silflay Hraka's generous number of outgoing links (161 versus an average of 92, though I can't yet test for, or qualify as, quality links) and it's shorter-than-average name (see above), the site has 25 fewer links than would be predicted (125 actual versus 150 predicted). I've done what I can to rectify this, of course.

Next question?

Further Quantifying the Heights of the Blogosphere, A Benefit of Brevity

We have previously discussed the relationship between outgoing and incoming links for the 177 sites both most linked-to and most link-generous in the Myelin blogging econsystem ("For each additional 10 outgoing links in their blogrolls, these sites receive an average of 4 more incoming links than their peers (a result statistically significant at the 98 percent level).")

Tonight, I analyze whether the length of a blog's name has any statistical relationship with the number of incoming links to that blog. I use the names assigned by the MBE (which are not always correct, e.g., "The Kolkata Libertarian" is named therein after its proprietor, Suman Palit). My hypothesis was that shorter blog names, easier to type and to link to, would be more likely to be cited.

(New Poll Shows Correlation Is Causation.)

Some evidence exists that this hypothesis is correct (a result significant at the 89 percent level). Each additional character in a blog-name is associated with 1.8 fewer incoming links. The average blog-name length is 15 characters. This result may help to explain the inexplicable success of the site IMAO, and will well-explain why I'm hoping to steal the domain name "O."

Sorry -- no graphs tonight. I have trouble working in three dimensions at this hour.

A Little Linky-Hate

In response to my post below, Frank J. of IMAO , the correctly certified Imperial Secretary of War, wrote,

Oscar Jr. has insulted me and tried to outdo my scientific survey of bloggers' ages (mine still has more digits). The official stance of IMAO is that we (meaning me) hate him. I have added a him to my blogroll so I can later de-link him (the ultimate insult to a blogger).

Readers can judge for yourselves whether I insulted Frank J. (I did credit his extensive use of digits), but note that I've added him to the Circle of Reciprocity, the easier to defend myself when he de-links me.

Anyway, Frank J.'s very clever in setting me up for a fall, and ("IMAO doesn't have enough outgoing links to make the sample, ahem.") improving his chances at becoming the youngest atop the Myelin blogging ecosystem. I suspect that Secretary Rumsfeld would be impressed.

Quantifying the Heights of the Blogosphere, or How to Avoid Work on a Saturday

Inspired by Frank J.'s unscientific poll of 62 of his self-selected blogger-readers (more here, here and here) and his very scientific use of digits in calculating an average blogger age of:

34.1612903225806451612903225806452 years of age,

I determined to add a small degree of "science" to the Blogosphere, surveying the 177 sites on both sides of the Myelin blogging ecosystem (i.e., both most-linked and most-linking) previously discussed here to see if I could verify IMAO's result. Of these 177, I was able to easily obtain (or estimate based on year of undergraduate degree) the age of 53 (or 30 percent of the) top bloggers. While this sample may well be biased (due to these bloggers' willingness to publish this personal information), I expected it to be less biased than a survey of readers of 23-year-old Frank J.'s juvenilia (one of whom is me, frequently). The youngest in my sample was Oliver Willis at age 25. (IMAO doesn't have enough outgoing links to make the sample, ahem.) Ben Domenech is surely younger, but I couldn't locate enough information to determine his specific age. I won't name the oldest, in the vain hope that he will someday visit this site.

For what it's worth, the average age for my sample of 53 webloggers is (IMAO-like) 36.9622641509434 and the median age is 36.

The full distribution is given here:

Comments on Comments on the Preliminary, Shoddy Analysis...

[moved to a new post for space reasons]
[edited extensively]

Charles G. Hill wrote:

I'm not sure exactly when you're supposed to add those ten to achieve the desired effect, and I have some general qualms about futzing with blogrolls — the ninety or so blogs I list are there because they are regularly read, not because I think I stand to gain anything from their presence...

I certainly didn't intend to imply that adding any random, additional blogroll links at any time will increase one's incoming links. My interpretation of these data is that websites with a high-quality blogroll (where quantity of good links can add to quality) are recognized as more valuable to readers and are, therefore, more likely to be linked. If I am correct, adding random sites to the 90 or so that Mr. Hill finds most read-worthy would not increase the value of his weblog to his readers and, at the least, not increase the number of linking sites. On the other hand, if he identified 10 additional weblogs that both he and his readers found worth visiting, Mr. Hill might expect a few more incoming links.

To give an example of this, even when I knew I'd read everything on a given day on InstaPundit, I would often return to the site because I knew that many of the weblogs that I liked to visit (and whose url's I hadn't yet memorized) were linked on his site.

Bigwig wrote (in the comments below):

[Y]ou need to factor in the age of the blog, as well. Those lists tend to grow over time.

Perhaps, but I'm not so sure. I wrote, "Obviously, I'm not in MBE territory yet", recognizing the fact that this site has not been around long enough (or, more likely, is not good enough) to fulfill the prediction implied by my analysis. Similarly, Cyberangel, who (in Mr. Hill's comments) wrote, "Ha! I defy you both & have no one linked to me! Yet. :)" appears to have been around for only three-ish months.

However, once 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?

Next, in my comments, Mr. Hill wrote, "As long as you don't factor in the age of the blogger. I'm already depressed." Please don't be depressed, at least in this respect: I hope to test next the number of incoming links based on webloggers' age (controlling, if possible, for the age of the blogs themselves). I expect that my hypothesis, that blogger age correlates positively with incoming links (and hits), will be borne out. I may even seek testimony from Mr. Quick, Mr. Den Beste and Mr. Reynolds. (Thanks to Frank J. of IMAO for the idea!)

Finally, for tonight, Kevin McGehee (who, note, is on my blogroll) wrote (in Mr. Hill's comments):

To my utter mystification, and in utter confoundment of Oscar's number-crunching, I am linked by a great many more blogs than are in my blogroll.

I live to contradict the statisticians.

Well, outliers exits, and Mr. McGehee may well be one. (However, he may not realize how many incoming links he's forgone by failing to link to this site.) But, of course, I would never predict that all the sites on the MBE would have more outgoing than incoming links. Even at the heights of the blogosphere, not everyone can be above average within the sample, so I don't consider my analysis confounded. For what it's worth, InstaPundit (second to Dave Winer) receives 515 more incoming links than can be explained by his outgoing generosity. As noted below, I'm down about 135 at this point.

A Preliminary and Shoddy Statistical Analysis of the Heights of the Blogosphere

Having read weblogs for awhile now (starting a few months prior to 9/11/2001), and having played with this site for a couple of weeks, I've been pondering the effect of "blogrolling." More specifically, I wondered whether sending outgoing links generally results in incoming links. An ideal test of this hypothesis would require obtaining a complete (or at least random) sample of blogs and counting their incoming and outgoing links. I've no time for that.

Instead, procrastinating, I copied the latest iteration of the Myelin blogging ecosystem ("MBE"), parsed the data, and removed the obvious non-blogs and duplicate entries. The MBE is a ranking of the 500ish most-linked-to and the 500ish most-linking sites identified. Of these joint 500s, 180 weblogs feature in both categories (i.e., are both popular and generous). Obviously, these sites are going to have both more incoming links and more outgoing links than the average weblog, but it's not obvious to me that those with relatively more outgoing links will also have relatively more incoming links (i.e., the more generous of these 180 will also be the more popular).

(New Poll Shows Correlation Is Causation.)

They are. For each additional 10 outgoing links in their blogrolls, these sites receive an average of 4 more incoming links than their peers (a result statistically significant at the 98 percent level).

For what it's worth, this analysis would predict 134 incoming links to this young site. Obviously, I'm not in MBE territory yet. Or it may just reflect a lack of quality.

Update: The number of sites in both MBE categories is 177, not 180. I missed a few duplicates.

Why Do So Many Journalists Use Similar Blogger Templates?

Here's the new weblog (allegedly) published by the great columnist Dave Barry, the design of which is blamed on journalist and Dot Con author Ken Layne.

Is it me, or does this look strangely similar to the mysterious site of A. Beam, namesake of Boston Globe journalist and weblog critic Alex Beam? (Scroll up on Instapundit for much more on the old and amusing Alex Beam controversy.)

Perhaps it's just a coincidence. Or is Ken Layne the mastermind uniting 'old media' with the Blogosphere?

Update: Page, in fact, the Last Page, (an excellent site that I recommend, hence its existence on the massive blogroll) carries forth the torch on this blog-investigation. I assure you, dear reader, that we will get to the bottom of this. Or my name isn't Oscar Jr.