Mathemagenic

Found via referer logs: A look at links in weblogs, a small study looking at "a correlation between listing a site in a blogroll and linking to that site in weblog posts".

Tasks:

• Experimented with some mapping tools.
• Processed three months of archives from five blogs and checked:
  • Most popular post links, are they in blogroll?
  • Blogroll links, are they mentioned in posts.

Pattern discovered (see also an exception)

These results were typical for 4 out of 5 blogs examined

• Post links least a few of the most linked to sites show up in the blogroll.
• Blogroll links the majority (60 to 90 percent) of blogroll links are linked to in postings.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Here is an example of benefits of doing "community work" on-line: maintaining the KnowledgeBoard blogroll brings me into a contact with all kinds of interesting people.

The recent example is an e-mail of Barry Hardy pointing to his weblog The ferryman. With new weblogs I often go and see what the first post was about. When I saw the first post by Barry I couldn't resist quoting it whole:

Why the Ferryman name?

If you have ever been to Basel in Switzerland you may have taken a ferry across the Rhine between the main city and "Klein Basel"(Little Basel). This ferry is tethered to a cable line stretching across the river and uses only the river's current to be pushed quietly from one side to the other. Here I imagine sitting with the river's flow of information swirling past, reflecting on the voices that have spoken to me that day. Here we can also sit together and share a conversation as we observe the constant and changing flow around us.

And so this Blog has been taken to the river.

"You will learn it," said the Ferryman Vasudeva, "but not from me. The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it too... And it sometimes happened that while listening to the river, they both thought the same thoughts, perhaps of a conversation of the previous day, or about one of the travellers whose fate and circumstances occupied their minds, or death, or their childhood; and when the river told them something good at the same moment, they looked at each other, both thinking the same thought, both happy at the same answer to the same question."

Herman Hesse

Finally, I've got the reviews for my abstract on weblogs and knowledge work for OKLC04. It is accepted, but one of the reviewers was more negative than positive and also suggested that I missed some relevant references:

There exist extensive studies on evaluating weblogs as a basis for suggestions to improve the knowledge transfer. These studies have not been cited. For example the group of T. Hermann at Dortmund University has done a lot of research in this area (http://iugsun.cs.uni-dortmund.de/publications/publications/inhalt/)

I checked the suggested publications, but didn't find explicit pointers to weblog studies (I still have to check the papers in more depth). Is there someone who knows about this research? I would appreciate any pointers or background information.

This comment made me thinking in more general way about difficulties of finding publications on weblog research:

1. I suspect that weblogs are addressed with more "serious-looking" terms, like "personal webpublishing"
2. It's not easy to predict in what type of conference/journal weblog research will be published: could be anything between internet studies, education or e-business
3. It seems that some weblog researchers do not have weblogs themselves, so the information about their work do not get to the blogosphere. Or sometimes they have weblogs in languages I don't understand :(

That's why I feel bad about luck of coordination between people doing research on weblogs. Back to work...

This post also appears on channel weblog research