My Bursty Blogs: An Analysis

An anonymous commenter said: "Your blog posts come in bursts. Do you blog when you think of something to write, or do you think of something to write when you blog? For the non-CS posts....Probably a bit of both, like when we write papers...". While I am trying to fill in their thoughts on my non-CS posts, let me respond. I have things to blog about, and jot them down in a notebook like the one on the left or in others blogged about earlier. When I get time (weekends, during travels), I pick one that has the right mass of thoughts and references, and spend 30 min -- an hour writing each of the little posts you see, republishing them a few times. So, I am an inefficient blogger, an old fashioned writer.




I learned from Corinna Cortes: why use informal arguments for analyses when you can use data? Here is the data. Irina Rozenbaum (now at Google) and Hongi Xue (now at Yahoo!) working off a discussion with Graham Cormode built a blog parser that decomposes a blog into posts, comments, words and links and shows you an analysis, such as a plot of number of posts vs day of the week (on the right), list of commenters, words used, etc. The interface is not ready for prime time, so ignore the data quality problems. (The link above will not support the hovering feature.) If you want to get your blogs analyzed, go here. Disclaimer: It has to be a blogger site, and it will take a few minutes. Enjoy!