The Robots and media contagion

by Lilia Efimova on August 17, 2005

Monday morning I didn’t know that I’ll spend the evening in a company of The Robots (the guys behind 43 Things, 43 Places and All Consuming) and Lee LeFever welcoming Cameron Marlow who happen to be in Seattle with beers and fun.

Between other things we had a nice presentation of Cameron’s dissertation research (photos by Daniel Spils and Erik Benson), talked about blogs and dreams and all other 43 things…

Cameron’s dissertation (The structural determinants of media contagion) should be online soon – there is a lot of good stuff in there… A few things to remember:

there seem to be a correlation between the frequency of updates and number of incoming links for a weblog
static and dynamic links (blog homepage/permalinks, see earlier research) are not that different (on 1 month sample) in terms of connectivity (re: mapping blog communities) – survey data on types of relations behind linking explains some of it
there is no S innovation diffusion curve in the blogosphere – if something picks up it happens exponentially
meme traces are visible in patches – how much ideas travel through backchannel?
survey response rate and travel through the blogosphere really picked up once Cameron added funny banners to it
upflux didn’g gain much support and has been discontinued – bad for blog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/08/17.html#a1633; comments are here.