Archive for January, 2009
Newer Entries »Blogger typology: quantitative analysis step 1
Sunday, January 4th, 2009
I’ve published the first dump of survey and “blog metrics” data from the blogger questionnaire as a spreadsheet on Google Docs. Many, many thanks to all of you who volunteered your information.
Please feel free to use this as you see fit for your own projects. I’ve anonymised this data (just because it’s best practice, not because I think any blogger would be mortally offended by having the world know what inspires them to blog!)
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Tags: amazon, analysis, bloggers, box plot, boxplot, conversation index, excel, getafreelancer, graph, mechanical turk, visualization
Posted in blogger typology, measurement, research | 5 Comments »
A simple perl script to interrogate the Technorati API
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
Sometimes (for instance when I’m doing the research for the blogger typology) you need to get a whole load of Technorati data for a whole load of blogs.
This research can (of course) be done by hand. And (of course) for a long list of blogs this would take a great deal of time. Handily, Technorati provides developers with an API that lets you automate those queries. An API (for those of you who don’t know) is an Application Programming Interface – a toolkit provided by a service or application (in this case by Technorati) that lets other computer applications ask it questions and use the answers for their own purposes. It may be helpful to think of APIs as being like the knobs on top of a Lego brick that let you stick other Lego on to it without in any way changing the nature of the brick itself. On the other hand it may not be so helpful after all.
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Tags: api, bloggers, blogs, perl, research, technorati
Posted in blogger typology, hack, how to | 8 Comments »
