User-created information and tools

Blog comments analysed

Mishne & Glance (2006) have been researching how blog comments are related to the importance of a blog and what kind of information the comments hold. They automatically collected data about posts and comments from 36044 blogs over a time period of 20 days.

From a random sample of 500 of these blogs, 80% allowed comments but only 28% had any. They estimate the comments to be between 10% and 20% of the total blogosphere text content. The number of comments follows a typical power-law distribution, where most blogs have few, if any comments per post but some few, very influental blogs have more than 100 comments per post.

Comparing the number of comments of a blog to other popularity metrics, they concluded that comment amount is an indication of a blog's popularity and influence level. When a blog has more comments than expected, it is often a personal blog where the writer's friends use it more or less as a chat forum, or blogs that attract people with lower technological skills, such as fashion or celebrity blogs. To me, it seem to be possible that it can also be related to the gender and social skills of the reader. The "non-tech" blogs attracting more females, which according to recent reports (need a reference to that Brittish report I read recently) are more social than males on the internet. Also, fewer comments than expected is often the result of some kind of comment moderation on popular blogs, due to massive spamming.

Not surprisingly, "The posts that are most insightful or controversial get the most comments."

References

Mishne, G., Glance, N. (2006). Leave a Reply: An Analysis of Weblog Comments. WWW2006, May 22-26, 2006, Edinburgh, UK.

posted by Jimmyroq @ 21:44