Blogging about blogs about blogs

The most sure-fire way for a university to get noticed by bloggers is to do a study about blogs -- which is exactly what researchers in our School of Computer Science did. This study examines which blogs one should read to quickly find out what topics are most popular in the blogosphere. The researchers put together a list of the top 100 blogs to read if your goal is to find out what all bloggers are talking about.

But the paper (a full copy is available here) isn't just about blogs. It turns out that the question of which blogs to read in order to avoid missing the biggest stories is a problem similar to deciding where to place sensors to detect contamination in a water distribution network. Bloggers, of course, are all over this study, with examples here and here.

Jonathan Potts