Feeds That Matter A Study of Bloglines Subscriptions

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Feeds That MatterA Study of Bloglines
Subscriptions
Akshay JavaPranam Kolari, Tim Finin, Anupam
Joshi, Tim Oates
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Outline

• Background and Motivation
• Bloglines General Statistics
• Grouping Related Topics
• Applications
• Conclusion

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Bloglines Feed Reader
Folders
Use folder label as approximation for
topic. Group similar folders together Rank Feeds
under a topic
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Motivation

• Study user generated tags in feed reader
  subscriptions
• Find relevant blogs about a topic
• Needed labeled, training data for building text
  classifiers for different topics

Tag Cloud generated by using folder names and
merging related folders
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Outline

• Background and Motivation
• Bloglines General Statistics
• Grouping Related Topics
• Applications
• Conclusion

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Bloglines General Statistics

• 83K publicly listed subscribers
• 2.8M feeds, 500K are unique
• 26K users (35) use folders to organize
  subscriptions
• Data collected in May 2006

Although there may be 50M Blogs, only a small
fraction get continued user attention in the form
of subscriptions
Users subscribe to Web 2.0 content such as
flickr, delicious, technorati and google searches
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Bloglines General Statistics
Feed Subscriptions follow a power law distribution
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Bloglines General Statistics

• Most users subscribe to modest number of feeds
• Most users have only a few folders
• User attention is limited

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Bloglines General Statistics
As subscriptions increase, users tend to
organize them into folders.
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Outline

• Background and Motivation
• Bloglines General Statistics
• Grouping Related Topics
• Applications
• Conclusion

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Bloglines General Statistics
technologica
Musica
Foreign Language
Weather
Email, Mailing List, Tracking
A folksonomy emerges from the folder names. Many
users use popular folder names to classify feeds.
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Tag Cloud Before Merge
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Tag Cloud After Merge
Folder names are used as topics. Lower ranked
folder are merged into a higher ranked folder if
there is an overlap and a high cosine similarity.
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Merging Tags

• Interesting Cases
• Music vs. Musica English and Spanish Music
  sites
• Podcasting vs. Podcasts One refers to the tools
  for podcasting while the other feeds containing
  podcasts
• Regional Interests China, Japan, India, etc.
• Foreign Language Spanish, German

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Feeds That Matter

• Top Feeds for Politics
• Merged folders political, political blogs
• Talking Points Memo by Joshua Micah Marshall
• Daily Kos State of the Nation
• Eschaton
• The Washington Monthly
• Wonkette, Politics for People with Dirty Minds
• http//instapundit.com/
• Informed Comment
• Power Line
• AMERICAblog Because a great nation deserves the
  truth
• Crooks and Liars

• Top Feeds for Knitting
• Merged folders knitting blogs
• Yarn Harlotknitting
• Wendy Knits!
• See Eunny Knit!
• the blue blog
• Grumperina goes to local yarn shops and Home
  Depot
• You Knit What??
• Mason-Dixon Knitting
• knit and tonic
• Crazy Aunt Purl
• http//www.lollygirl.com/blog/

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Most Subscribed Feeds, Top Folders
Top Feeds
Top Folders

• Bloglines
• Wired
• Slashdot
• BloingBoing
• Dilbert
• Gizmodo
• Engadget
• Official Google Blog
• Alist Apart
• News CNN, Reuters, Moreover

• News
• Blogs
• Tech
• Comics
• Politics
• Podcasts
• Design
• Sports
• Science
• Business

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Tag Merging
Folder names are used as topics. Lower ranked
folder are merged into a higher ranked folder if
there is an overlap and a high cosine similarity.
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Outline

• Background and Motivation
• Bloglines General Statistics
• Grouping Related Topics
• Applications
• Conclusion

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FTM! Site
Explore Popular Topics
Subscribe To Interesting Feeds
If you like X you will like
http//ftm.umbc.edu
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Feed Recommender (Method 1)

• Two feeds are similar if they are categorized
  under similar folders

Technology
Politics
Business
knitting
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Feed Recommendation (Method 2)

• Start with a seed set from FTM!
• Using, graph from WWE dataset, find nodes
  influenced by the seed set
• Find other blogs frequently co-cited by the
  followers

Blogs influenced by seed set
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Feed Recommendation Using Co-citation
Politics
Knitting
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Outline

• Background and Motivation
• Bloglines General Statistics
• Grouping Related Topics
• Applications
• Conclusion

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Conclusions

• Folder labels can be used to produce an intuitive
  set of topics for feeds or blogs
• Subscription information combined with simple
  techniques can be quite effective in ranking
  blogs for a topic.
• Many useful applications such as feed
  recommendation and meme trackers can benefit from
  this data.

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University Study Reveals Rich Data on Bloglines
Feeds Feeds That Matter is a fascinating new
analysis project out of UMBC and a terrific way
to find new RSS feeds to subscribe to.. - Steve
Rubel, Micropersuasion blog
Want to find a few good feeds? Try Feeds That
Matter, an interesting grouping of publicly
listed feeds at Bloglines delicious user
skyamese
It brings you popular feeds from Bloglines in
different categories and I found almost all the
popular feeds in appropriate categories out
there. Worth paying a visit netgautam blogger
Provides a "swarm" with keywords on subjects
which will take you to a list of blogs/sites
relating to that keyword. All are rss feeds
delicious user damenjoe .
Thanks!
Find how to classify your feeds and find new
feeds based on tags - delicious user inf
Links to loads of good RSS feeds. hmspolio
find information and resources that have already
been filtered by like minded people
Tryangulation blog
Nothing better to read online? Feeds that matters
gives you loads of highly rated feeds in all
category
.great source for some quality content for a
blog or just for browsing. Blendedblog blogger
kind of a meta blog delicious user frontporsche
it's a great example of a technique for
extracting usefulmetadata from the world - JD on
EP blog
Easy way to find good blogs -delicious user kc144
600 bookmarks on delicious more
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Backup
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Feed Recommendation (Method 2)

• Starting with a seed set from FTM! Find other
  influential feeds from Blogpulse data, using
  co-citations.

www.dailykos.com
Blogs influenced by seed set