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Saturday, January 18, 2003
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Krebs' post points out that "the data made public by the retailer shows just the 'best buddies' -- the strongest ties. Other patterns may emerge with investigation of weaker ties. "
I wonder if this is less surprising than it seems. (Less surprising than it is interesting?). Wouldn't the "strongest ties" be, by definition, the most "opinionated"? And wouldn't the most opinionated tend to be be on "peaks" of isolation? So I wonder...perhaps we're seeing the "saddle" between two peaks. And perhaps the heuristic for identifying the pool of "best buddies" is to "slice off" progressively-larger peak-tops until the purity of the peaks begins to be diluted. In that case, we would stop collecting buddies at precisely the point at which overlap begins.
Anyway, that's the conjecture. If its true, there could be a metric of "polarization" based upon how much of each mountain is above the saddle vs. below....
I think I know what I mean (but sometimes I'm so smart even *I* don't know what I'm talking about ;->)
Disconnects.
Political Patterns on the WWW. Valdis Krebs always has interesting things to discover using social networks and databases. The fact that people who read political books tend to fall into 2 camps is not too unusual but the abolute separation is pretty surprising. It would appear that the 'right' side has fewer books in the cluster than the 'left' side. Wonder what that means, if anything? [A Man with a Ph.D]
4:24:36 PM 
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The LiveJournal boom.
Did you know that LiveJournal is probably the largest weblog service around? Their users seldom read weblogs outside LiveJournal, which is what makes them less visible to outsiders. Here's a company profile from late 2002 which states that
LiveJournal boasts a total of 782,000+ users. Of these users, 64% are female, 93% are free accounts, and a large majority of the users are between 15 and 21 years of age. The 729,000 free accounts are made possible because of the 37,000 users that pay. When a user pays, they are contributing a little over $2 a month to pay for LiveJournal and the extra features they have access to.
In case you want to see the impressive growth curve, here's a little zipped Excel file for you: LiveJournalStats.zip, based on the data here. I've estimated that if their membership continues to double every year, their user base will surpass in number the population of Canada around 2008.
And here's another post on LiveJournal demographics at Unbounded Spiral, a blog that you'll surely enjoy if you like reading (or writing!) Ross Mayfield's weblog. [Seb's Open Research]
3:43:24 PM
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Weblogs.com keeps rollin' along. A week ago I thought that we might see an uptick in the slope of the growth of Weblogs.com activity, as measured by the high water mark, in coming months. All it took was one little Supreme Court case to do it. The site hit a new high water mark yesterday that was more than 100 weblogs higher than the previous mark (during the MacWorld SF 2003 keynote; this is a hint that increased activity on existing blogs is a major driver of the high water mark). The figure of merit is now 2.8, back to where it was in October. I thought this was a good time to make my source data available. I will continue to post comments as new high water marks are reached, but I think it will be more useful if people can get to the data themselves. Itís now downloadable in Excel format from this site. (The spreadsheet is under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license. Feel free to use it wherever you like, just give me credit and make any changes and additional research available.) [Jarrett House North]
3:13:58 PM
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© Copyright
2003
Jon Schull.
Last update:
10/23/03; 7:40:50 PM.
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