mediaczar

Over the holidays, I started playing with a new Yahoo! pipe to pull information from Technorati into a spreadsheet. The reasons why I wanted to do this are covered in this post about the quantitative analysis of blogs, and my eventual perl-based solution to the problem is covered in this post.

The problem with the perl-based approach is that it’s a little inaccessible to people who aren’t comfortable using a command line environment. So I really wanted to make something that more people would feel comfortable using, and perhaps play around with.

So, with some help and kind words from Bob Briski, one of whose pipes I’d stumbled across and bookmarked during my research for this project, I decided to finish off the pipe and publish it so that others could use it, or (better still) improve upon it.
Continue reading ‘The Technorati Authority Yahoo! Pipe’

Thanks to IBM’s Many Eyes service it’s relatively simple to create complicated visualizations that my current version of Excel can’t handle. For example, this “matrix chart” that I built using Excel’s bubble chart function is clearly unacceptable. I can’t easily link statements or values to the X and Y axes, and there’s lots of overlapping that seems (after many attempts) to be impossible to fix.

Continue reading ‘Blogger typology: using IBM’s Many Eyes to build matrix charts’

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!)
Continue reading ‘Blogger typology: quantitative analysis step 1′

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.
Continue reading ‘A simple perl script to interrogate the Technorati API’

(NB: If you have both a blog and a short attention span, please skip the article, and go straight to this short survey. Many thanks!)

What is a blogger? Everyone seems to think they know, and yet the longer I work in this area, the more I realize I know nothing. And the less I know, the more suspicious I become of marketers who use vague terms like “conversation” (which has – after all – become little more than a Latinization of the ghastly “dialogue”.) I can just about understand what Technorati means when they talk about

The ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation.

(State of the Blogosphere 2008)

…but there are an awful lot of long words that could turn out to hide an awful lot. And that’s the carefully thought-out distillation of a bunch of experts. Most of us, most of the time fall back on lazy or confusing language. We talk about “social media” and never stop to think that — depending on who’s doing the talking (and what they have to sell) — what is meant by that apparently innocuous phrase shifts wildly from speaker to speaker.
Continue reading ‘Your help needed to develop “blogger typology”’