Submission + - Characteristics of traffic to the blogosphere
virgilio almeida writes: "Traffic to the blogosphere is less influenced by search engines than traffic to web sites is. This is one the several findings about blogosphere reported in the study, "*Traffic Characteristics and Communication Patterns in Blogosphere*," published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, held in March 26-28, 2007, in Boulder, Colorado.
The study concludes that the intensity of traffic directed to a blog through search engines (which use traditional page-rank algorithms) does not seem to correlate with the "real" popularity of the blog, and suggests that social-network-based navigation may be playing an increasingly important role in web navigation in general, and blogosphere navigation in particular. On that count the authors note that in blogspace, the popularity of a blog is more a reflection of its owner's social attributes (e.g., celebrity status, reputation, and public image) than a reflection of the number and rank of other blogs or web pages that point to it. This highlights the need for the development of page-rank algorithms that take into consideration the social attributes of blogosphere actors (as opposed to solely on the topology of the underlying blogspace), possibly using inference techniques.
The study has also analyzed the nature of interactions between users and blogs. This more-interactive nature of the blogosphere leads to interesting traffic and communication patterns, which are different from those observed in traditional web content. They have observed different levels of "conversation" in the blogosphere. Access to objects in blogspace could be conceived as part of an interaction between an author and its readership. As they show in the study, such interactions range from one-to-many "broadcast-type" and many-to-one "registration-type" communication between an author and its readers, to multi-way, iterative "parlor-type" dialogues among members of an interest group.
The study is available at: http://www.icwsm.org/program.html"
