ResearchBuzz

I can’t believe I’m writing this in August 2007, but if you’re busy thinking about November 2008 you’ll have lots of fun over at Wonkosphere ( http://wonkosphere.com ), a site which is tracking buzz on the major presidential candidates. (I saw only Republican and Democratic candidates represented.)

The site tracks with a graph the candidates and their level of buzz in the blogosphere. It also pulls out particular posts and provides stats for chatter in different sections of the ’sphere — conservative, liberal, and neutral. Dennis Kucinich, clocking in at number 10 on the list of 12, has a list of recent blog posts mentioning him and the tone among liberal and conservative blogs (Tone measures how positive the content of the blog postings was.) (Why not list the tone among politically-neutral blogs? In some ways I would find that the most interesting stat.)

Each candidate, as you might expect, also has their own page. Here is John McCain’s page. Graphs show buzz and tone over time (with a comparison to the candidates overall) and a list shows the most recent blog posts dealing with the candidate. And here’s where there might be a slight problem. On McCain’s page (and several other candidate pages) there are a lot of stories about Larry Craig. I don’t know if that’s because there are brief candidate mentions, or if because there’s been such a huge amount of coverage of that particular story so quickly, but they have very little to do with the candidates in whose lists they are appearing.

I found I got more out of the blog posts when it was very obvious (via the headline) that they were about a particular candidate, or about a particular issue that candidate was known for. I got the data and the current discussion points from there and relied on the graphs for an overview on where the candidate is buzzwise.

If you’re wondering exactly what blogs are being mined for this data, you can get a breakdown at http://wonkosphere.com/directory.htm . There are something over 1200 blogs here. I was very surprised at how many more conservative (over 700) blogs there were compared to liberal (just over 400.) There were a tiny number (45) of independent blogs.

Despite the fact that the hype machine is gassing up and pulling out onto the highway, the elections are still over a year away, and because of that news political coverage is still unformed, speculating about possible presidential candidates (even longshots), focusing on the current administration, and getting easily distracted by scandal. That makes Wonkosphere’s job tough. I expect as we get closer to the election, narrow down the candidates, etc, the buzz reporting and post lists will get a lot better. Worth a look.

It’s been announced on the Blogger blog that there’s a new way to browse for Blogger content. Now, when you go to a Blogger blog’s profile page, you can click on one of the elements of the profile page and browse all other profiles that also contain that same element.

For example, say we’re looking at the profile page for the Alaska State Historical Collections Mystery Photos, located at http://www.blogger.com/profile/11205033399138363188. The location of the profile has been filled out, as has the industry. If you click on Juneau link and you’ll get a list of all the Blogger profiles (390 at this writing) that are located in Juneau.

(Note that these profiles are the product of the bloggers themselves and there doesn’t appear to be any oversight. I browsed some profiles where some of the words were innocuous but the resulting listings were absolutely not safe for work. Be warned.)

The keywords/locations for which you’re searching show up in the result URL– for example, finding Blogger profiles that include an interest in tennis has an URL that looks like this: http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=i&q=tennis . I tried to add other interests to the search to find multiple interests at the same time (finding someone interested in tennis AND golf, for example) but that doesn’t appear to work.

If you want to find multiple interests, or people in a certain location that are interested in certain things, use Google. So say I’m looking for people in Texas who are interested in dancing. Notice that the profile pages include a Location: space and an Interests space. I can do the following search that takes advantage of the profile page patterns:

site:blogger.com “location * texas” “interests * dancing”

The asterisks are for full-word wildcards in the locations and interests patterns. In this case you’ll get four results.

Of course, if you just one to browse one aspects of a Blogger profile, do the browsing right from the Blogger site. The Google search is good because it allows searching across multiple parameters, but there’s no guarantee that Google has indexed all the profiles…

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Now that FeedBurner has been acquired by Google, it’s probably not too surprising that Google has FeedBurner tags on some of its blogs (alas, not all, not yet.) I had some fun wandering around the blogs and seeing what was being read the most. (Being read the most in FeedBurner, of course; this doesn’t count how many people are visiting the Web site, watching the pages, etc.)

The Official Google Blog has as you might expect over 440 THOUSAND readers. I’m surprised that the Gmail blog has less than 5000 readers (of course, it’s much more new.) GMail’s FeedBurner readership is only about 500 more than the Orkut blog, which I would not have expected.

Meanwhile, the Google.org blog has less than 300 readers in FeedBurner — very surprising! The Google Mashup Editor blog has less than 500, less surprising since this application is not yet publicly available.

Between the GMail blog and the Google.org, blog, the Public Policy Blog has over 2000 readers.

I can’t wait for the FeedBurner badge to be added to the all the Google blogs. How is the Google Reader blog stacking up against Google Book Search? What about Google LatLong or Inside AdWords? The mind boggles…

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .