As the song says....

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 10:03 AM

It's less than a week until Thanksgiving, but Christmas decorations seem to have been up for months in retail stores. Are we rushing the season? Perhaps....(the spike, by the way, is for the Canadian celebration of Thanksgiving.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 12:00 PM

If you're curious about which videos bloggers are most curious about, BlogPulse has added a new segment of blog analysis called "Top Videos." Today's list of the 40 most-cited videos, it's obvious, is dominated by YouTube.com offerings. TOday's, for example, is called Kiwi, an animated film done as part of a student's master's thesis. As with other BlogPulse data sets, the list is based on the videos that bloggers cite or link to the most in their blog posts.

A link to the Top VIdeos section is now available on the left-hand navigation bar off the home page and in the left-hand navigation list on the Analysis page. Results are retroactive to Oct. 16. Enjoy!

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 04:52 PM

Nielsen BuzzMetrics, the parent company of BlogPulse, today announced that it's making "buzz" data available to CNET's TechRepublic web site, where IT professionals provide peer reviews of hardware and software products.

Data from BuzzMetrics' reservoir of online consumer discussions - culled from boards, blogs, forums, Usenet, etc. - are automatically fed into two charts that are integrated into the TechRepublic reviews. A Buzz Score measures the volume of online buzz about the products being discussed; a Slant Score tracks the percentage of positive posts for each product reviewed. It's the first in a series of publisher applications being made available by BuzzMetrics to media firms, publishers, portals, advertisers, etc. See a sample here for Microsoft Windows.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 11:00 AM

Within minutes of the announcement that U.S. forces had killed Iraqi-based al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the blogosphere starting popping. If you check out the BlogPulse Live graph on the home page, in fact, you'll notice a uptick in blog discussions about "politics" (the orange line on the graph), which encompasses any mention of the war in Iraq and related issues.

An internal BlogPulse tool that tracks blog posts as they're published shows these keywords dominating the list of most common phrases in blog posts by 9:30 a.m.: abu, musba, al-zarqawi, iraq, airstrike, osama, al-qaida, al-qaeda, Baquba (the Iraqi city where al-Zarqawi was killed), terrorist, beheaded, bombing and Bagdhad, among others.

The fallout?
Omar at Iraq the Model resorts to all-capital letters to proclaim: "CONGRATULATIONS TO IRAQ, CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WHOLE WORLD ON THIS VICTORY." The blogger at Military News provides the military talking points, while in a counterpoint post, the Current Era Blog reports that as recently as this week (before today's news), some military officials were saying the war in Iraq is already lost.

A BlogPulse trend graph indicates that while al-Zarqawi was a central figure in the terrorist movement, the movement is perhaps bigger than one man.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 09:58 AM

It's a day for big shifts in thinking, starting with Sen. Russ Feingold, a possible 2008 Democratic presidential nominee and today's No. 2 burstiest person for proposing a vote today that would censure President George Bush (today's top top news story and No. 3 top blog post) for exceeding executive powers and ignoring judicial oversight for the NSA domestic spying program. Brilliant at Breakfast is obviously thrilled to see a Democrat with a backbone; blogger Don Surber calls it more adolescent politics. What does a BlogPulse trend graph say about the "i-word" vs. the "c-word"?



Chile Breaks the Gender Barrier
From the stage of world leaders comes Chile's gender-shifting decision to elect Michelle Bachelet (today's No. 16 most-blogged-about personality) as its first woman president (today's No. 3 most-cited news story). "Wouldn't it be something?..." says a wisftul U.S.-based Magpie blogger. Former Yugoslav presidetn Slobodan Milosevic is today's No. 3 top person after being found dead in his cell at The Hague over the weekend, and former Iraq President Saddam Hussein is in the news because apparently thought about what might happen in post-war Iraq...perhaps more than his country's "liberators" did?

Speaking out
Two people are capturing attention for speaking out, including former British soldier Ben Griffin, today's burstiest person because of an interview in which he describes his moral decision to leave the British military rather than continue fighting what he calls an immoral "mess" in Iraq. And at No. 15 among today's burstiest people is Dr. Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-born woman whose criticism of Muslim extremists (today's No. 6 most-cited news story) is bringing her praise...and death threats. "Meet the voice of reason," says one blogger; the blogger at Sisu offers perspective and background.

BlogPulse News
The Olympics are over, Josh Mankiewicz is back from vacation, and his Mank Blog is back on MSNBC's Dateline, which receives weekly blog data from BlogPulse.com and Technorati in a blogosphere roundup.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 11:46 AM

Out of nowwhere, personality expert Renee Baron is today's most-blogged personality, mostly because of a popular Enneagram meme (shared activity or game) that's making the rounds among bloggers (today's No. 21 top link) (The Enneagram is one method of classifying people based on personality traits). Which probably makes sense, because there are lots of, shall we say, intriguing personalities in the blogosphere today.

Stingy personified
From the stingy category comes a Canadian family who found someone's camera in Hawaii and then decided, well, their kid liked it so much they wouldn't return it to the owner. It's the subject of today's No. 2 top blog post.

Snoopy, scary
Thank goodness the librarians in Bethesda, MD., are a quick-thinking lot. They politely escorted OUT of the library a few overzealous "officials" who asked a few too many questions about what patrons were looking at on the library's public computers (today's ninth most-cited news story among bloggers). Is this what the fight against terrorism has come to, asks Swisher's Untitlted Blog Project?

Cartoon defense
The Danish editor who published the Muhammed cartoons that have stirred up the Muslim world defends his actions in today's most-cited news story, titled "Why I Published Those Cartoons." The blogger at Villainous Company wonders if the melting pot has melted into a tribal society that will be constantly at odds?

Not the marrying type
On the heels of Valentine's Day, here's a warning to all women about the kind of guy NOT to consider in your nuptial dreams, thanks to the second-most-shared link from The Smoking Gun.

English Major humor
If Garrison Keillor can do public service commercials for the Coalition of English Majors, then Geoffrey Chaucer can have a blog. And he doth, at today's third most-popular linke.

BlogPulse News: the 23-million blog milestone
For those who keep track, BlogPulse.com today surpassed the 23-million blog milestone in its index.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 10:28 AM

Just a few minutes ago, a new feature took up residence on the BlogPulse home page (upper-right corner), and it's called BlogPulse Live.

Powered by a behind-the-scenes tool we lovingly refer to as FloodGate, BlogPulse Live provides a real-time, minute-by-minute view of the most popular topics that bloggers are writing about. Each topical line represents a percentage of all blog posts as they're published (Eastern time). Click on the small chart on the home page for a larger view.

Here's how it works: BlogPulse Live captures new blog entries, and then text-mining and text-analysis technologies categorize the posts into key subject areas, such as "Diaries" (personal journals), "Politics," "Movies/TV," "Technology," "Sports," "Health," "Religion," "Meme," (online game/activity/quiz that's circulated by/among bloggers) "Food" and more.

BlogPulse Live will be especially useful when certain news events take place, and this weekend will provide a perfect example to put it to the test. Check back before, during and after the Super Bowl game on Sunday, for example, to see if "Sports" discussion muscles its way into the leading categories.

More blog innovation
Matthew Hurst, Intelliseek's Director of Research and a key member of the BlogPulse team, has been working on different visualization methods for capturing what's going on in the blogosphere. You can check out the work at Matt's Data Mining blog.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 03:48 PM

How good are bloggers at predicting movie success? Does blog discussion serve as a leading indicator or reflective mirror to box-office success? BlogPulse piggybacks on yesterday's announcement of Oscar nominations (today's No. 2 most-cited link) for the 78th annual Academy Awards program to examine the issue of blog buzz and flick successes or failures.

First, a research paper titled "Predicting Movies Sales from Blogger Sentiment," coauthored by Intelliseek's own Natalie Glance (a senior researcher and key member of the BlogPulse Team) and Gilad Mishne of the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam, has been accepted for presentation at a symposium titled "Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs" March 27-29 at Stanford University.

Their conclusion? References to movies in blog posts correlate with their financial success (before and after release), and factoring in sentiment measurements works better (especially in pre-release phases) than raw counts when making correlations. Genre and time of year also factor into a flick's success.

So what's this year's Oscar buzz?
Over the next few days, BlogPulse will begin tracking ongoing blog buzz about this year's nominees. Today: the actors and actresses nominated for this year's awards. First....the guys nominated for Best Actor, wherein Heath Ledger of "Brokeback Mountain" and Philip Seymour Hoffman of "Capote" seem to heading the pack:

And the women nominated for Best Actress, where Reese Witherspoon of "Walk the Line" seems to have an edge going into the event.




Tomorrow, a look at the films nominated for best picture.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 10:31 AM

There's big news today at Intelliseek, the home of BlogPulse: This morning, VNU announced that it has signed an agreement in principle to bring together Intelliseek and BuzzMetrics into a single company whose goal will be the creation of a new global standard for measuring and understanding word-of-mouth behavior and influence.

Upon closing, the new company, BuzzMetrics Inc., will operate under the "Nielsen BuzzMetrics"
brand and will be headquartered in New York City, with offices in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Israel (in late 2005, VNU also invested in Israel-based Trendum and merged it with BuzzMetrics).
Both companies are recognized leaders in helping major companies, corporations and brands listen to, measure and act upon consumer-generated media: the consumer dialogue that affects
their markets.

The Nielsen BuzzMetrics service will fully leverage the strategic and financial backing of VNU, parent to such renowed research names as ACNielsen and Nielsen Media Research. And for BlogPulse users, the new company remains committed to BlogPulse -- which passed the 21-million blog threshold this week -- as an important component of the new business. More information is available at a new Nielsen BuzzMetrics web page set up specifically for this announcement, including a link to the full press release and information about a 1 p.m. webinar today by the new executive team.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 10:08 AM

In case you haven't noticed, BlogPulse is developing a multi-media reputation. On an informal basis, BlogPulse and Technorati are providing weekly blog highlights and data to NBC's Dateline (7 p.m. Sundays) for a segment about what's buzzing in the blogosphere. Josh Mankiewicz' "Mank Blog" takes a look at last Sunday's segment and some of the ongoing viewer reaction.

CBS News this week also launched the Blogophile, a blog by Melissa P. McNamara. Her first entry, "Catch the Buzz on the Blogs," gives several nods to BlogPulse and captures the who-what-why behind the issues and personalities that spurred blog discussions in early January.

As they say in the biz, stay tuned for more....

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 10:21 AM

Everyone at BlogPulse extends holiday greetings and good things ahead in 2006 for all of BlogPulse's users and readers. Whatever your wishes for the holiday season and the coming year, we hope they're as good as those illustrated in a BlogPulse trend graph of good things....



Holiday schedules...
BlogPulse data will continue to update on a daily basis through the holidays, but blog entries at BlogPulse Newswire and BlogPulse Spotlight will be updated only occasionally between Christmas and New Year's. See you again in early January!

--The BlogPulse Team

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 10:41 AM

As a leader in the blog-search space, BlogPulse is continually striving to ensure that we have the most comprehensive index of blog posts possible. To that end we regularly update our crawlers with information about new (and newly discovered) blogs.

Recently, we have been busy ensuring that we capture not just English-language blogs, but many non-English blogs as well. The plan is to extend our services to include searches for blogs in a number of different languages.

As a result of these efforts, you may notice some changes in our trend searches. Trend searching reports a normalized graph of the number of hits for a query. As our index now includes more foreign blogs, some trend searches will reflect unusual or dropping patterns due to the lower percentage of English blogs in the mix. This generally happens on trends for terms with a large number of hits. For example, see the slowly dipping trend for buzz about the "seven deadly sins" or similar drops when comparing "mother vs. father." A similar drop takes place in a graph comparing buzz about the seven continents.

As we move forward with our plans for multi-lingual services, we will be modifying the underlying system to remove these kinks. Thanks for understanding...

--The BlogPulse team

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 04:41 PM

The Third International Workshop on Weblogging Ecosystems will take place in May 2006 in Edinburgh, Scotland/UK. As with the previous workshops, this is being held in conjunction with the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW-2006). The call for papers for the workshop is now available online.

Key organizers include members of the BlogPulse/Intelliseek team. As with previous workshops, organizers are calling for papers describing research related to textual, visual, graphical and/or sociological analysis of the blogosphere. In addition, they also have announced the release of a large data set of weblog posts in conjunction with the workshop.

Please visit the CFP link/site for details, and please feel free to distribute this CFP to colleagues and to appropriate mailing lists.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 09:24 AM

The same conservatives who blasted Harriet Miers as a possible Supreme Court judge are welcoming President Bush's nomination of Samuel Alito, who is today's burstiest person among bloggers (ranking behind only Harry Potter).

Alito's nomination also consumes 25 of today's top 40 blog posts, with reactions ranging from Think Progress' crstyal-ball examination of America's future with Alito on the bench to PoliPundit's number-crunching about Alito's chances of being voted in or out. PowerLine bloggers are tallying votes, too.

A BlogPulse trend graph shows that Harriet Miers captured much more intense discussion throughout her brief nomination period:




Alito Analysis
The Volokh Conspiracy looks at the influence of religion (that is, Catholicism) on the Supreme Court, Blue Mass. Group takes a liberal's view of Alito's kind of law, and The Rude Pundit is well, mad AND extremely rude (no link; it's THAT rude). Taegan Goddard predicts an "epic battle" over the nomination.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 09:32 AM

As soon as news spread of the late Monday death of civil rights pioneer Rosa L. Parks, bloggers began sharing their memories, condolences and tributes to the meek but strong woman from Alabama who single-handedly, some say, mobilized an entire human rights movement. BlogPulse began capturing the tributes immediately, and the BlogPulse tech team compiled a short movie that visualizes Parks-related activity and posts in real time.

"Deeply sad" to "God Bless You" to "Lugar Reservado" ("a place is reserved") are only a handful of the thousands of blog posts that mentioned Parks soon after her death was announced. A BlogPulse trend graph also captures the huge spike in discussion about Parks:

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 04:55 PM

Before we get into the meat of today's blog buzz, an announcement: Intelliseek's BlogPulse.com data and analysis is being made available to AOL users under an agreement announced today by the two companies. Welcome, AOL, to the world of BlogPulse.com.

Judy Miller: The Scrutiny Continues
Now that New York Times reporter Judy Miller (today's No. 3 top personality) has written a personal account (today's second most-shared link) of what she remembers of the Valerie Plame case, and the Times has written its own piece of the coverage (today's top link), bloggers are chiming in with their own media reviews.

Jay Rosen at PressThink (today's No. 6 top blog post) isn't the only person to be a little put out that Miller's answer to the key quesiton of who identified Valerie Plame as a CIA agent is "I don't remember." Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine thinks the key (underplayed) news is that Miller's taking time off from the Times newsroom, and wonders if she'll ever return. The PowerLine bloggers think the whole investigation's much ado about nothing, Mark Kleiman has some theories of his own about why a name was leaked at all, Arianna Huffington thinks Miller's just a bad reporter and Editor & Publisher takes the strongest stance by asking the Times to apologize and fire Miller for "crimes against journalism."

BlogPulse's graphical feature shows buzz about Miller and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. The June spike coincides with Miller's jailing for initially refusing to testify and her eventual late September release from jail to testify.



The elections in Iraq
Iraqis braved 100-degree-plus heat over the weekend to vote on a new constitution, and bloggers at Iraq the Model and Hammorabi feature updates, photos and analysis from the polling places.

A Halloween Alternative?
An enterprising young blogger named copinggoggles has come up with a Halloween alternative called The Puca Project (today's top blog post). Instead of demanding candy or vandalizing, trick-or-treaters are encouraged to be nice-and-greeters by doing unconventionally sweet and unexpected acts on Halloween. "Awesome idea" says a blogger who lives near Park Avenue. "Go forth and spread the magic," entreats another LiveJournaler.

What's your blog worth?
If you've ever wondered what your blog is worth, Business Opportunities Blog provides the applet that comes up with a fair-market value. Delftsman and Liberalismo have already crunched the numbers.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 08:12 AM

A BlogPulse analysis finds that Wikipedia, the user-created, collaborative online encyclopedia, is one of the hottest applications on the Internet. In fact, consumer references and blog links to Wikipedia have increased steadily and dramatically in the past few months, fueled by increased blog traffic and a need for real-time updates about breaking news stories.

More than twice as many bloggers now refer to Wikipedia as they do to the more traditional term "encyclopedia," and a half-percent of all blog posts typically cite Wikipeda as a source of information. Bloggers, in fact, mention Wikipedia six times more frequently than they mention Encyclopedia Britannica's web site.



The breaking news fuel
According to the BlogPulse analysis:
• July's subway bombings in London and the August-September coverage of Hurricane Katrina have contributed greatly to noticeable spikes in the use of Wikipedia as a source of immediate and thorough news, background and context.
• Wikipedia's trust level is obviously on the rise, fueled by an increase in consumer-generated media across the Internet and the thoughtful, passionate and mediated postings that appear on Wikipedia.
• Of the foreign-langue Wikipedia versions (French, Germany, Italian, Spanish, Japanes, Polish, Portuguese, Dutch and Swedish), blog citations to the German-language Wikipedia increased the most, nearly doubling in the past six months.

"Wikipedia is filling users' needs for a comprehensive and current directory of resources and facts on a wide range of subjects, and it does so as a potent cross between an Encyclopedia Britannica and a Yahoo! Directory with continuous updates," said Sundar Kadayam, Chief Technology Officer of Intelliseek and product manager of BlogPulse.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 10:49 AM

Power of the blogosphere? Sheer dedication of a grieving war mother? Whatever is fueling Cindy Sheehan's rise to popularity, it's working. The woman holding vigil outside President Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch (now accessible via satellite photos at crytpome) upstaged Bush in BlogPulse's key people list starting late last week and continues to hold No. 2 to his No. 3 spot today. A BlogPulse graph plots her two-week rise to fame:



While the gold-star mother (today's No. 28 link) begs the President to meet with her in person during his August vacation, others are examining the fallout and intensifying their scrutiny of the war in Iraq, fueled by Frank Rich's No. 3 top link today "Someone Tell the President the War is Over" and "A Message to Cindy Sheehan" from Iraq the Model blog (today's No. 2 top blog post). Meanwhile, Daily Kos offers tips on how to frame the Cindy discussion, while Michelle Malkin unconfirmedly dishes personal dirt. Protein Wisdom (No. 8 blog post) offers some wit into an otherwise un-funny situation.

Scrutiny galore
Elsewhere, coverage of the war includes a Washington Post assessment of lowered expectations in Iraq (with some reality-vs.-unreality commentary by Washington Monthly) and the discovery of a post-invasion chemical stash near Mosul (and "told you so" commentary by Heretical Ideas.)

BlogPulse News: The 15-Million Blog Milestone...and BlogPulse Paraphernalia!
Ever had a hankering for a BlogPulse T-shirt or coffee mug? A swell BlogPulse mouse pad? Feast your eyes on the latest BlogPulse paraphernalia, now available at cafepress.com. Impress your coworkers. Advertise us for free...we appreciate it. And if you haven't paid attention to the home-page stats box, BlogPulse exceeded the 15-million blog milestone over the weekend. Woohoo!

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 09:53 AM

You offered ideas and suggestions. The BlogPulse team listened.

BlogPulse's new look and new data points, debuting today, provide even deeper data and more meaningful statistics into what's happening, what's being discussed and where influence lies in the world of blogging.

Heck, the official press release isn't even out yet, and BlogPulse is already being scrutinized, including nods from BlogHerald and Marketing Vox.

What's new?
There's plenty of new daily data -- top blogs, top blog posts, top news stories and top news sources being cited, and they join the previous list of top links, key phrases and top people being blogged about. (Interesting to note that Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts, highly popular a day after his nomination, has been booted out of first place already by the late James "Beam Me Up, Scotty" Doohan, who died Wednesday).

Introducing...BlogProfile
Still in testing phases (patience, please?) is a totally new feature called BlogPulse Profiles, which adds metrics to the top-ranked 10,000 blogs, based on citations, posting and linking behavior. Find out how key blogs rank, examine posting and linking behavior, discover common phrases for specific blogs and learn which blogs are similar, based on content and other factors.

Let us entertain you, too
As they say in infomercial land, "and that's not all!" In addition to this weekday blog entry (now renamed BlogPulse Newswire), BlogPulse has an entertainment-focused blog called BlogPulse Spotlight, keeping users informed about movies, celebs, gossip, music, publishing, art, gaming, gadgets and all the other stuff that makes life, well, entertaining.

Check out the new BlogPulse. Send feedback. Keep the ideas coming....

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 08:41 AM

Bloggers love to talk about entertainment -- movies that soar and movies that suck, the latest in celebrity gossip, hot video games, must-read books, what's new on the music scene, industry rumblings and more.

BlogPulse is paying attention. Starting today, BlogPulse users get a sneak preview of an Entertainment-Themed Blog that will soon be a regular feature of the soon-to-be-upgraded BlogPulse.

Authored by veteran blogger Philip Ewing, a recent Ohio University graduate, the entertainment-specific blog delves deeper into who's movin' and what's shakin' in the entertainment industry.

Look for a post or two a day, on topics as wide-ranging as the entertainment scene itself...Spin Magazine's top 100 albums list, users' wish-list ideas for the next-generation iPod and a fitting tribute to the men whose voices made Winnie the Pooh characters come alive lo, these many years.

And what's up with the Supreme Court's latest decision on online file-sharing?

How are you spending YOUR summer?




As they say in the biz, stay tuned...

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 09:56 AM

BlogPulse reached another milestone this week when it identified 12 million blogs. It took less than six weeks, in fact, to move from 10 million blogs to the current 12.1 million in the BlogPulse index.

Of the 12-plus million total, between 3.8-3.9 million are considered "active" (meaning new information has been posted) in the last 30 days, 5.2 million are considered active in the last 60 days and slightly more than half have been active in the last 90 days.

How do blogs stand in the hierarchy of information sources? Quite well, thank you.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 12:27 PM

BlogPulse surpassed the 11-million blog milestone earlier this week, just 23 days after it first identified 10 million total blogs in late April. And to keep up with the boom in creating and understanding blogs, BlogPulse today also offers two new features for users:

• Clickable Trend Charts: The popular Trend Chart feature tracks "buzz" on issues, personalities or phrases over 1-, 2- or 6-month periods. Usability testing revealed a need to understand the reasons for spikes in buzz. For example: Buzz about "Star Wars - Episode III: Revenge of the Sith," which lingered at about .5% of all blog posts since early May, has increased fivefold in the last two weeks to 3% of all blog posts, triggered by the movie's opening today. BlogPulse users can now click on a chart spike to drill through and read the specific blog comments that fueled the spikes. Users can also create their own charts using the BlogPulse Trend Tool.

• Enhanced "Conversation Tracking": In response to feedback, users can now search for any topic in BlogPulse’s "Conversation Tracker" tool. It is no longer necessary to type in the exact link or full URL of a blog post or site. The Conversation Tracker allows users to gauge the extent to which bloggers refer to links or mention topics.

And for the curious: of BlogPulse's 11 million identified blogs, 3.5 million are classified as "active" in the last 30 days.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 03:29 PM

Intelliseek's senior researchers Natalie Glance and Matthew Hurst, key members of the BlogPulse team, participated Tuesday in the Second Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem in Japan. They've set up a conference blog that covers highlights of the international conference.

What's the buzz on rising gas prices? BlogPulse tracked discussion about the terms "gas guzzler" and "hybrid car" and found this interesting trend:



And for folks who speak a definitely different language, the Vancouver Courier documents the passing of an era of Trekkies, many of whom are distraught that the long-running series is disappearing at the end of the week. But never fear: there's a Klingon blog for folks who just can't get enough.

One of BlogPulse's loyal blogger-readers, Steeph's blog, did a little graphing of drug-related vices and found some interesting trends.

BLOGPULSE TREND GRAPH OF THE DAY: See how Steeph's vices compare with BlogPulse's running tab on the seven deadly sins.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 11:10 AM

Part three of BlogPulse's recognition of 10-million blog milestone continues today, but first -- the announcement of a new feature at BlogPulse.

Now, users of BlogPulse can take advantage of RSS (syndication) feeds for their search results. The BlogPulse search function, which appears at the top of most pages or on the advanced search page, allows users to search for specific keywords/key phrases in blog posts or across entire URLs. Now when your search results are presented, you can click on the link next to the search bar that says "subscribe to feed for this search." Then add it to your favorite feed reader, and BlogPulse will deliver to your reader new posts that match your search query.

The other fairly new search feature allows you, with a simple click, to create a trend graph of your search results (click on the "trend this search" link).

The 10-million blog milestone, visually presented
BlogPulse's march toward the identification of 10 million blogs took more than a year, but the growth was particularly pronounced in the past six months. Our engineering team has been tracking the progress from 5 milion blogs in November 2004 to more than 10 million today:



Top 10 blog posts
And for a bit of comparison, BlogPulse took at look at recent blog activity from March 1-April 18, a span in which the following 10 blog posts were the most cited (note: some are now dead/suspended):

• LJ | 10 last readers v.1.0 (suspended)
• The Llama Song
• Yahoo actually does acquire Flickr
• Numa Numa
• A Wooster Exclusive: Banksy Hits New York's Most Famous Museums (All of them)
• The Terri Schiavo Information Page
• Totally just invented the best format for music EVER
• The great 'Stop F---ing Him' post (warning: strong language)
• Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam
• How to really confuse your party guests

(Note: BlogPulse Highlights might be dormant for a few days while I take some personal time to care for my father. If no one fills in, see you on Monday).

BLOGPULSE TREND GRAPH OF THE DAY: Pope Benedict XVI has settled in, but the man who used to be Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is still a hot topic of discussion and scrutiny.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 09:14 AM

Yesterday, BlogPulse announced it had identified more than 10 million blogs in the blogosphere, and today, a few more "Top 10" lists to mark the occasion.

Top news sources cited by bloggers
Bloggers tend to cite a fairly predictable stable of news sources in their posts, although a few changes have occured since the end of 2004. According to data from March 1-April 18, the San Francisco Chronicle and News.com have moved into the Top 10 list, which includes:

• Yahoo! News (40,145 citations)
• New York Times (37,825 citations)
• CNN (27,099 citations)
• Washington Post (22,729 citations)
• MSNBC (20,116 citations)
• BBC (10,993 citations)
• The Guardian (UK) (9,788 citations)
• San Francisco Chronicle (9,706 citations)
• News.com (9,129 citations)
• Los Angeles Times (8,579 citations)
The Chronicle was propelled, no doubt, by Jon Carrol's recent "Unitarian Jihad" column (see next list), the most-cited news story during the time frame.

Most-linked news stories
And which news stories received the most links during the six weeks beginning March 1?
• Jon Carroll's "Unitarian Jihad" (San Franciso Chronicle)
• New Scientist's "13 things that do not make sense"
• The New York Times' "The Message Machine: How the Government Makes News; Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged News"
• The Alligator's"Capitol bill aims to control 'leftist' profs"
• MSNBC's "Terri Schiavo dies, but battle continues"
• The Independent's "Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world"
• CNN's "Has Cookie Monster given up sweets?"
• New York Times'"List of Schiavo Donors Will Be Sold by Direct-Marketing Firm"
• CNN's "Pet store owner: Satan's image on turtle's shell" (link no longer active)
• Washington Post's "And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty"

Foreign-language blogs?
For those who've been asking, about 12% of the 10 million blogs identified by BlogPulse are foreign-language blogs.

Intelliseek also issued a press release today that summarizes some of these 2005 findings.

BLOGPULSE TREND GRAPH OF THE DAY: As President Bush continues into his second term, emphasis seems to be moving away from Social Security reform and toward the Supreme Court and other issues.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 08:40 AM

Just a few weeks shy of its first anniversary, BlogPulse has reached a key milesteone. On Saturday, BlogPulse technology identified more than 10 million blogs in the Blogosphere. And in honor of the number 10, we pulled a few statistics for people who favor Top 10 lists.

"Even we've been surprised at the unprecedented growth of the blogging phenomenon," said Sundar Kadayam, chief technology officer for Intelliseek, which owns BlogPulse. "To pass 10 million in less than a year is testament to both the rapid adoption of blogs and our technology's ability to analyze blog content and activity." (BlogPulse launched May 7, 2004).

On Sunday, BlogPulse had identified a total of 10,032,827 blogs -- 26,668 of them in the last 24 hours. Other common questions about blog indexing include:

What percent of all blogs does 10 million represent?
Ten million is the number of blogs that BlogPulse has discovered to date, and it represents the majority of publicly accessible English-language blogs.

Of the 10 million total, how many are active and how many are inactive?
According to our statistics, 31% are active within the last 30 days, 44% are active within the last 60 days and slightly more than half (51%) are active within the last 90 days. "Active" means a new post has been added.

In honor of the number 10, the BlogPulse tech team pulled some top 10 lists from recent posts covering March 1-April 18.

Top 10 blogs (based on numbers of citations)
• Boing Boing (6,568 citations)
• EnGadget (4,624 citations)
• Daily Kos (4,341 citations)
• Slashdot (3,874 citations)
• Instapundit (3,117 citations)
• Albino Black Sheep (2,948 citations)
• Michelle Malkin (2,801 citations)
• Gizmodo (2,500 citations)
• Powerline Blog (2,314 citations)
• Captain's Quarter Blog (2,039 citations)

Top 10 People Cited
And during that same time period, which people/personalities/celebrities got the most bloggers' ink?
• Terri Schiavo (24,017 citations)
• Pope John Paul II (16,610 citations)
• President Bush (15,461 citations)
• Britney Spears (10,641 citations)
• Michael Jackson (10,634 citations)
• Tom Delay (6,399 citations)
• Johnny Depp (6,249 citations)
• Donnie Darko (3,878 citations)
• Ashlee Simpson (3,818 citations)
• Michael Schiavo (3,579 citations)

BLOGPULSE TREND GRAPH OF THE DAY: Where do you worship? This graph comparing the names of various houses of worship shows definite weekly attendance patterns.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 08:45 AM

In case you haven't noticed, BlogPulse Highlights (the official BlogPulse blog) underwent a makeover this week. The blog now has a permanent URL home (http://blog.blogpulse.com), with fuller blog features that include monthly archives and trackbacks. The most recent post will continue to be featured at the BlogPulse home page with one-click access to the full blog.

In addition, BlogPulse has turned on the comments function for all news posts, and as always, we welcome feedback from all BlogPulse visitors. The RSS feed for BlogPulse Highlights remains the same.

One of users' favorite features of BlogPulse is its ability to create trend graphs that chart buzz on specific topics, personalities or issues over time. Now that U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair has announced May 5 elections in the U.K., here's a look at blog buzz about leading candidates:



BlogPulse also features a full page of trends on current topics. Click on any topic to get the full graph.

British bloggers have been playing with BlogPulse graphs, too. Several are featured at perfect.co.uk and at aquarionics.

BLOGPULSE TREND GRAPH OF THE DAY: You'd think tax-related discussion would start spiking, but it's remaining fairly flat as the April 15 deadline nears for filing U.S. income tax returns. (And to my father...Happy 81st Birthday, Pop!)

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 09:54 AM

In case you haven't already noticed, BlogPulse underwent some major improvements over the past week. The highlights include access to six months of blog posts for URL and keyword searches, a daily count of blog activity on the home page, and the ability to create customized trend graphs that cover 1, 2, 3 or 6 months of data.

A nice example of a new six-month trend graph comparing four terms -- war, peace, disaster, politics -- (see below) comes from Steeph's blog.



And that's not all! BlogPulse 2.0 is also faster and now has identified more than 9.3 million blogs; in the last 24 hours, it analyzed data from 301,320 blog posts. In that same time frame, BlogPulse discovered 38,817 new blogs.

Many of these improvements are the result of suggestions from loyal BlogPulse users, and the entire BlogPulse team sends a big "thanks!" and the encouragement to keep 'em coming!

Key highlights of BlogPulse 2.0:
• Deeper index: BlogPulse users now have access to six months of blog data instead of the previous 60-day archive.
• Better search capabilities: Users can search through six months of blog posts AND visualize results with a one-click "trend this search" icon that appears next to search results. For a sample, check out this search for "Star Wars" and then click on the icon next to "Search Results" to visualize the buzz.
• Time-frame options for graphs: Users interested in creating visual graphs that track/compare blog "buzz" can choose from one of four time frames -- 1, 2, 3, or 6 months.
• Better link search capabilities: Previously, BlogPulse users who searched an entire link/URL received results only for that site's home page; now, search results cover the entire site/URL.

Engineering upgrades also added some zip to BlogPulse's performance.

Thanks to the entire BlogPulse team -- CTO Sundar Kadayam, senior researchers Natalie Glance and Matthew Hurst, engineer Mark Reed and graphics guru Cecilly Van Dyke -- for some awesome work, even greater ideas and very cool plans for future upgrades. Stay tuned!

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 09:13 AM

Natalie Glance, one of BlogPulse's senior researchers, has co-authored a fascinating paper that examines the degree of interaction and behavior among top conservative and liberal political bloggers during the November Presidential election, and the findings are quite revealing.

The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog, written with Lada Adamic of HP Labs, examines the posts of 40 "A-list" conservative and liberal blogs in the two months leading up to the Nov. 2004 Presidential Election. The study also includes a one-day snapshot of more than 1,000 political blogs. Highlights?

• Coverage by political leaning was fairly balanced. Of 1,494 blogs that met the researchers' definition of influence, 759 were liberal and 735 were conservative.

• Even though numbers of blogs were fairly balanced, conservative blogs showed a greater tendency to link to other blogs (84% linked to other blogs, 82% received a link) compared to liberal blogs (74% linked to other blogs, 67% received a link). That behavior is captured in the following graphic from the paper, which illustrates the division between liberal (blue) and conservative (red) blogs. Orange links go from liberal to conservative, purple links from conservative to liberal. The size of each blog (indicated by a circle) reflects the number of other blogs that link to it.



• Conservative blogs also linked to more numbers of blogs (15.1 average) than did liberal blogs (13.6 average). In the single-day snapshot analysis, the most linked to liberal blog had more links (Daily Kos at 338) than the most linked to conservative blog (Instapundit at 277), although Glance and Adamic found that "the distribution of inlinks is highly uneven, with a few blogs of either persuasion having over a hundred incoming links, while hundreds of blogs have just one or two."

• Conservative blogs tended to rank higher overall than liberal blogs, with the top 20 conservative blogs falling in the 44 most-cited blogs while the top 20 liberal blogs fell in the top 77 most-cited blogs.

• Liberal and conservative bloggers also had clear preferences for mainstream news sources that they cited. Fox News (89%) and the National Review, (92%) for example, received most of their links from conservative-leaning blogs. By contrast, 91% of Salon.com's links came primarily from liberal-leaning blogs. Top right-leaning political bloggers tended to refer more frequently to the New York Post, WSJ Opinion Journal and the Washington Times, while left-leaning political bloggers linked more frequently to the Los Angeles Times, New Republic and Wall Street Journal. The New York Times, Google News and Washington Post tended to received equal numbers of links from both sides.

• Who were bloggers writing about? Curiously, 59% of the mentions of John Kerry came from right-leaning bloggers, while 53% of the mentions of George W. Bush came from left-leaning bloggers. Not surprisingly, some of the top political figures mentioned during the campaign, including CBS' Dan Rather, film maker Michael Moore, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others -- continue to be discussed as "key people" in the blogosphere today.

The current paper by Glance and Adamic bolsters BlogPulse's previous examination of bloggers' impact on the 2004 Presidential election, a special online report called Campaign Radar 2004. It and other special contributions are available in the BlogPulse Showcase section of the web site.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 10:45 AM

Just got back from the Jupiter Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City where blogs were hot -- blogs for public relations, blogs for marketing, blogs for advertising, blogs as media. Everybody was talking about blogs and their impact.

At Intelliseek's BlogPulse headquarters, everyone's talking about
BlogPulse's most youthful fan (pictured at right), the daughter of senior research scientist Matthew Hurst. She's sporting the latest in spring fashion gear, the BlogPulse.com T-shirt.

Microsoft's Bill Gates will soon be sporting something new -- a royal title. He's being given honorary knighthood status by Britan's Queen Elizabeth for his contributions to the business world. Elsewhere on the computer scene, Yahoo announced some new Web Services this week, and a bunch of computers were allowed to operate on the Internet unprotected.

In the land of scientific experimentation, how about a global jump? A bunch of scientists have organized World Jump Day for July 20, 2006, a day when everyone's supposed to jump at the same time to throw the earth slightly off orbit. It's today's 27th most shared link. (I'm scheduled to jump at 4:39:13...I'll wear comfortable shoes).

And not to brag or anything, but I took the Commonly Confused Words Test, today's top link, and scored "Advanced." (Sister Mary Protasia, rest her soul, would be proud).

Legal eagles are also getting plenty of traction among bloggers today, including speculation about the the bizarre Chicago deaths this week of the mother and husband of U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefko, recently the target of a murder plot by white supremacist Matthew Hale.

Other are discussing this week's Supreme Court ruling that declared unconstitutional the death penalty for juveniles under 18. The Roper vs. Simmons case was based on the murder conviction of Christopher Simmons, who was 17 when he murdered a woman -- and apparently bragged that he could get away with because of his age.

BLOGPULSE TREND GRAPH OF THE DAY: Post-Oscar buzz shows a slight uptick for best actress winner Hillary Swank, and although Jamie Foxx took hom the trophy, Johnny Depp (no doubt a favorite among LiveJournal teen bloggers) still gets most of the attention.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 12:04 PM

Bloggers played a critical role in providing timely on-the-scene coverage and disaster information immediately after the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami devastated vast sections of Southern Asia, and their influence continues with ongoing relief efforts.

That's according to an in-depth BlogPulse analysis of tsunami-related coverage by bloggers.

Now featured as a special section on BlogPulse, the analysis finds that the tsunami elicited far more discussion and interest than other 2004 natural disasters, including the Florida hurricanes and the eruption of Mount St. Helens.

Likewise, the remoteness of the disaster, combined with the ease of blog-publishing tools, gave birth to entirely new blogs dedicated solely to tsunami coverage – blogs that quickly claimed their place among other mainstream blogs.

While some of the same political bloggers who covered the 2004 Presidential election also were heavily involved in spreading news of the tsunami, their top 10 ranks were altered in December 2004-January 2005 by the emergence of four tsunami-only blogs: The Southeast Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog, The Diplomad, WorldChanging and Earth News.

Likewise, BlogPulse mapped the visual patterns of blog postings and country-specific blog posts for affected countries, including Thailand, India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Maldives. Before the tsunami, the respective countries were mentioned in anywhere from .1% to .3% of all blog posts. After the tsunami, the major countries were mentioned in up to 1% of all blog posts – a figure that has remained higher through January.

Other findings:

The most-mentioned relief agencies are, in order, the International Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies, UNICEF, Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders. As relief efforts continued into January, more blogger attention turned to UNICEF as agencies began focusing on helping orphans, protecting children at risk of abduction, and reuniting families.

Several blogs provided critical roles in covering the tsunami: first-hand, eyewitness accounts and videos of the tsunami. When mainstream-media news crews couldn't get to the remote countries for several days, bloggers stepped in and provided the first phases of on-the-scene coverage and commentary.

Blogs also filled another role: Accountability. Some blogs helped track where resources were spent and the results of those efforts, while others attempted to focus on other devastated areas of the world (civil war in Sudan; drought-affected Africa, etc.) in order to press the wider issues of international relief, foreign aid and foreign policy.

BLOGPULSE TREND GRAPH OF THE DAY: Because of tsunami-related coverage, the entire Asian contintent continues to receive an inordinate amount of "buzz" in the Blogosphere.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 09:00 AM

BlogPulse's 2004 Year in Review section is now live, clickable and chockful of interesting trends, tidbits, curiosities and pearls about the blogosphere.

Methodology: BlogPulse scoured 2004's blog postings. Top web sites, blogs, blog posts, media sources, media stories, books, movies, and products were found by counting the number of times bloggers linked to them during 2004. Top people, actors, and actresses were found by counting the number of times the names (including common variations thereof) appeared in posts.

The first batch of data, which includes top blogs, web sites, media sources, news stories, personalities and more, is available in the BlogPulse archive and presented graphically as well at the full Year in Review section.

Today's data includes entertainment-related blog finds, including:

Most blogged-about actors/actresses: Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Hilary Duff, Angelina Jolie, Tom Cruise, Lindsay Lohan, Jude Law, Mandy Moore and Tom Hanks.

Top audio files cited: Comedian Eric Idle’s "FCC Song;" Bush’s description of "tribal sovereignty;" music by the band Hard ‘n Phirm; a Nickelback mix; and William Shatner’s version of "Common People."

Top video files cited: Bush’s "one-fingered victory salute" during his Texas gubernatorial campaign; the "GOP convention in 60 seconds" montage; JibJab.com’s "This Land Is Your Land" animation; a film clip proposing a 9/11 Pentagon conspiracy; and a TV ad for a Transformer-dancing Citroen car.

Top movies: "Fahrenheit 9/11," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Ying Xiong (Hero)," "The Day After Tomorrow," "Shaun of the Dead," "Garden State," "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," "The Incredibles," "Spider-Man 2," and "Team America: World Police."

Top products at Amazon.com: "Star Wars: Trilogy" (DVD), "Garden State" soundtrack (CD), U2’s "How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" (CD), "Fahrenheit 9/11" (DVD), "Firefly -- The Complete Series" (DVD), and Philips HeartStart Home Automated External Defibrillator.

Top books at amazon.com/bn.com: Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry; The Da Vinci Code; The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction; My Life; Eats Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.

Cruise around at the Year in Review section. Click on the links. See what bloggers were discussing, creating, sharing and recommending.

Anyone making predictions about the blogosphere in 2005?

BLOGPULSE TREND GRAPH OF THE DAY: Happy Holidays everyone! Here's hoping you don't put on too many calories (or blog too many words) this season.

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 11:15 AM

You know how everyone does a "year in review" piece about this time of year? Here's ours, made possible by an analysis of all BlogPulse data by the geniuses who make this web site happen every single day. A drum roll, please...

The transcript of comedian Jon Stewart's not-so-funny October debate with CNN "Crossfire" hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala was the No. 1 "blogged" news item of 2004 at BlogPulse.com, based on links provided by bloggers to the transcript.

Bloggers linked to the "Crossfire" transcript in their online commentaries 1,880 times in 2004, followed by 1,415 references to Slate.com’s "Unfairenheit 9/11: The Lies of Michael Moore" and 1,174 citations for the BBC’s obituary of radio DJ John Peel.

Background on the Stewart transcript: Stewart hosts Comedy Central’s "The Daily Show." During his pre-election appearance on "Crossfire," Stewart lambasted his hosts for reducing the level of public discourse on serious political issues to shouting matches and sound bites.

Other top news stories, in order, were Common Dreams’ "Evidence Mounts That Vote May Have Been Hacked" (Nov. 6; 966 citations), CBS News’ "CBS Names Probe Panel" (Sept. 22; 953) and The Nation’s "100 Facts and 1 Opinion: The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration" (Oct. 30; 783).

Other key findings from the BlogPulse.com 2004 review of millions of postings, links and citations from the blogosphere:

Top people/personalities: (3.9 million total among the top 100) President George Bush (637,646 citations); Sen. John Kerry (411,977); movie character Harry Potter (333,418); singer Britney Spears (119,661) and film maker Michael Moore (111,876). Others of note: No. 6 Saddam Hussein (85,311); No. 12 Osama Bin Laden (63,003), No. 39 former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (23,649 hits) and No. 91 radio DJ Howard Stern (13, 236 hits).

Top News Sources: (2.2 million total among the top 100) Yahoo! News (205,093 citations); The New York Times (188,596); BBC (161,805), CNN (144,560) and The Washington Post (113,417). Others of note: No. 14 Fox News (34,915), No. 24 CBS News (19,865), and at No. 85, the English-version web site of Aljazeera.net (6,834).

Top Blogs: (527,881 among the top 100) BoingBoing: A Directory of Wonderful Things (23,836 citations); DailyKos political blog (21,530); Instapundit political blog (21,391), The Drudge Report news/political blog (19,220); and Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters (18,901).

Top Web Sites: (3.9 million among the top 100) Hello.com (571,569 citations), Quizilla.com (440,364), Memegen.net (286,362), Amazon.com (255,152) and Go-Quiz.com (217,443).

Keep checking back...a more complete and graphical summary of all of the 2004 year-end BlogPulse data (Yes, there's more! Top cited movies! Audio links! Video downloads! Images! Actors/Actresses!) will be featured here soon.

BLOGPULSE TREND GRAPH OF THE DAY: Here's one category where men dominate: blog discussion of "sexual enhancement drugs."

Posted by Sue MacDonald at 12:43 PM

Intelliseek's BlogPulse tech team ran some interesting data about blog activity on Tuesday and Wednesday -- Election Day and the day after. Not surprisingly, the data differed slightly from data collected about political postings and links at Campaign Radar 2004 during the campaign-intensive weeks leading up to the election. Among them:

TOP MEDIA SOURCES: While the New York Times, Washignton Post and Yahoo! News