Blogs Are Event Driven - Websites Are Not
An interesting post on Bernie Goldbach’s blog about the rising number of blogs covered Dave Sifry’s (Technorati) post on the state of the blogosphere. The flurries of activities in the graph confirm the event driven nature of blogs that makes them different from ordinary websites.
In building the Irish blog search engine one very important fact has become apparent: Blogs are updated aperiodically whereas websites are updated periodically. This makes tracking blog updates difficult and necessitates the use of blog pings. The problem for search engines is that blog pings are open to abuse. Some blog aggregators have time limits on the number of times per hour that a ping can be submitted. The system is not perfect because spam blogs have appeared. As with traditional search engine spam, these spam blogs are set up with keywords to attract readers to adverts rather than to provide the reader with information. Some blog search engines have not resolved the spam problem yet.
Blogs have caused a shift in website patterns. Traditionally, the personal website has been some free webspace on an ISP. But with the advent of blogs, many personal websites have become blogs because of the ease of update. Previously, running a personal website meant having some web development software on the PC. The free blog services remove the necessity to have web development software and makes the publishing on the web accessible to a wider audience.
With a website, it is easy for a search engine operator to see that some sites update on a monthly or weekly basis and others have a yearly update frequency. Most websites are brochureware and are only updated once or twice a year.
Blogs, by comparison, are a very bursty form of communications. They need a trigger event (something about which the blogger feels strongly enough to write about it) to see updates. When particular blogs update, a cascade effect occurs on many other blogs. The blog posting link growth pattern is totally different to that between ordinary websites. It is the difference between the pattern of a shattering pane of glass and the growing branches of an oak tree.
With an aperiodic system, six months between updates means as much as six hours.The old periodic model of website updates does not work with blogs. The simple reason: blogs have a human factor whereas websites generally have a business factor.
Tags: IrishBlogs , Blogs , Internet Statistics , Search Engines , Technorati
Written by John McCormac on March 19th, 2005 with 3 comments.
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