The science of blog reading

The science of blog reading: Nick Carr gives us an executive summary of an article by a team from CMU (and Nielsen) and he explains their thesis with the following foreword: The problem of detecting contaminants in a public water system is analogous to the problem of figuring out what’s going on in the blogosphere. Any article that claims that the blogosphere is essentially a sewer, is worth the read. I whole heartedly disagree with the list of 100 blogs that “everyone should read” but the concept is amusing and the principles behind their claims might have some merits. But then again I disagree with any and all such lists because all blogs and their readers do not have the same interest in all subject matters. Also as an astute commenter on that post points out, some of the blogs on that list aren’t even updated anymore and thus their list should have been better researched or at least chronologically updated before publication. Some researchers (I have been guilty of this myself when I wrote my thesis) concentrate on the numbers so completely that they tend to forget the bigger picture and consequently lose some credibility in their folly. If you are interested in social behavior surrounding blogging, the article is called Cost-Effective Outbreak Detection in Networks.