Blog Analysis: A dynamic, exciting field

The world is abuzz with the Web 2.0 phenomenon, and there is a lot of effort at corporate and agency levels going into thought leadership around using the blogosphere and other new media in various ways.

EmPower Research, for the past few years, has been tracking and analyzing this space. EmPower uses several metrics and indicators to demystify the blogosphere for its clients.

We use many search engines, some proprietary software and finally what we like to call a “software aided human process” to gather all content and some preliminary metrics.

A tangential thought that struck me as I was reading a blog post the other day was to see how popular the various hosting platforms were. Sheer serendipity – I basically checked in 4 search engines for 3 diverse categories. Google blogs and Blogpulse showed me easily the urls of the blogs – so I could carry out an analysis, but technorati and ice rocket did not, though they had trend graphs that I could compare.

The categories/ search words I used were: “Telecom Services”, “Beer”, and “Nursery Education” (examples from three currently ongoing projects that we are working on). The results were interesting to me








A few points that leapt to the eye were:
• Google blogs does not seem to cover myspace blogs
• Strangely, Google blog search does not necessarily favor blogs written on blogspot (blogger) – this could be a) because blogspot is universally acknowledged as popular, and so finds fairly high salience across search engines, or, b) because google is in any case not into self promotion of their own properties
• Google blogs has a much higher ratio of individual/ other blogs
• Blogpulse, on the other hand, has a more diverse ‘key’ platform source





The results, ofcourse, differed by category a bit:
• For Google Blogs, Nursery Education had the most international (read primarily EMEA, infact, mainly the U.K.) blogs – I guess mainly because of the key word used
• Also, for both the platforms, blogspot usage rose from telecom to beer to nursery education – not quite sure why/ what it signifies, though.
• Not surprisingly, very much in keeping with the user profile, Beer scored high for Myspace users – it’s a matching demographic, one would think!

Incidentally, both Technorati and Ice Rocket do give you hits by day – again, interestingly enough, both had different figures, though the trends matched more or less.

Blog posts mentioning telecom services per day for the past 30 days.





Blog posts mentioning beer per day for the past 30 days.





Blog posts mentioning nursery education per day for the past 30 days.