Daniel Collins of Down To Earth blog, did a little research on the power law as it applies to the recent and current standing of various (mostly science) blogs, with some interesting obervations about the edge effects, the gradual lowering of the slope, and the slow move of the cut-off point towards the right.
The main points:
- science blogosphere is still young, growing and developing.
- the power-law works only for the high-ranked blogs, i.e., the "B/C-list", and breaks down for superpopular blogs as well as low-ranked blogs.
- we play the Red Queen game, i.e., each one of us needs to grow in the number of incoming links just to retain the same ranking.
One thing that may be a problem for his analysis is the difficulty of Technorati in dealing with Seed ScienceBlogs (many of the blogs Daniel analysed are from Seed). For instance, my blog's ranking has not been updated by Technorati in 100 days. I am certain that my ranking is much higher now than it was at the time I have just moved to Seed. I have contacted them about this but nothing got fixed so I gave up. I don't really care, but the problem can screw up mathematical analyses like the one Daniel performed, especially as it appears my blog is not the only one with this problem.
Also, when the Nature Top 50 list was formed, that was a time when a bunch of blogs have just moved to Seed. Thus, what they used was the Technorati rankings of the old sites as the new sites did not have a ranking yet. For me, they chose the ranking of Circadiana, which put me at the 20th place. If they used the ranking of Science And Politics, I would have been 5th. If they used the rankings of The Magic School Bus, I would have been 46th. I do not know if Daniel used the rankings cited in that Nature list for his initial rankings calculations.
As I am not posting on my old blogs any more, and people are gradually moving their links from the old sites to the new one, the rankings of all three blogs are gradually slipping back. Science And Politics was ranked around 1490th about six moinths ago and is 6035th today. A Blog Around The Clock is ranked 7458th today, as it was 100 days ago when it was last updated.
Comments
To answer your question, the data presented here did not come from the Nature dataset. It's a good point you make about Technorati ranks of SB blogs, but a bunch of SB blogs appear to be picked up fine when I did the data mining (those that were not were excluded from the analysis).
Posted by: Daniel Collins | September 24, 2006 5:43 PM