Crowdsourced Study on Political Blogs
by Patrick Ruffini :: October 21st, 2007 10:58 pmLast week, tech bloggers compiled Google Reader subscriber data to build a compelling ranking of actual influence in the tech sphere.
I would like to do the same for political blogs, but I need your help.
I’ve started plugging in data in this Google spreadsheet, but the task before me is so massive that I can only hope to have a comprehensive data set by crowdsourcing it. Basically, for any given blog, I need you to look up two things: number of subscribers in Google Reader, and in Bloglines. You don’t have to look up many blogs — just the ones you read up and down the tail. I’m also interested in local bloggers and lefty bloggers.
Once we’re done collecting the data (though will we ever be done… really?), we’ll have a model of blogosphere influence that’s arguably better than traffic numbers or inbound links, giving us a reliable measure of how many readers reward any given blogger with prize position in their feedreader.
To join in, please email me and give me your Google account email address. Or better yet, contact me through Facebook or LinkedIn so I’ll know you’re a trusted user.
The sheet has specific instructions on what to do.
In the end, I’m hoping to aggregate this data on hundreds (if not thousands?) of political blogs, and keep the data open for anyone to view or edit, including academics, PR professionals, and general students of the blogosphere.
Can you join in?
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That’s a good thought, but you’d have to give them very specific and narrow parameters to ensure we got quality data back (e.g. work off the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem or Memeorandum leaderboard when it launches).
Right now, I’m betting we can get better data out of political blog readers, though I am interested in trying Mechanical Turk for something like this.
Patrick, might this not be a good test of the Mechanical Turk?