Feeds That Matter A study of Bloglines subscriptions

1
Feeds That MatterA study of Bloglines
subscriptions
http//ftm.umbc.edu
Akshay Java, Tim Finin, Pranam Kolari, Tim Oates
General Statistics
Tag Cloud Before Merge

• 83,204 publicly listed subscribers.
• 2,786,687 feeds of which 496,879 are unique.
• 26,2436 users (35) use folders to organize
  subscriptions
• Data collected in May 2006.

The number of subscribers per feed follows a
power law distribution.
The distribution of domains in the Bloglines
dataset.
Tag cloud generated by using the folder names as
labels (Top 200 folder names).
Scatter plot showing the relation between the
number of folders and the number of feeds
subscribed. As more feeds are subscribed users
tend to organize feeds into folders.
Folder Names are used as a substitute for topics.
Lower ranked folder merged into a higher ranked
folder if there is an overlap and high cosine
similarity.
The number of folders per user. Most users tend
to use modest number of folders.
Applications
Tag Cloud After Merge
Feed Recommendations
Finding Influential Feeds for a Topic.
Two feeds are similar if they are categorized
under similar folder names. The above chart shows
the feed recommendations and corresponding text
based cosine similarity.
Leading Blogs on topic Politics. Seed set are
top blogs in politics from bloglines and blog
graph used is from Blogpulse dataset..
Tag cloud generated by merging related folders
(Top 200 folder names).