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Judit Bar-Ilan of Bar-Ilan University (what were the odds?) presented “An outsider’s view on ‘topic oriented’ blogging”.

(We’ll skip the “what is a blog” slide, k?)

Bar-Ilan credits Tim Berners-Lee with being the “father of the blogs” based on his status report from 1992. (I’m pretty sure Tim’s not concerned with the title.) “The blogging community is very much aware of itself.” (Amen, sister.) She was actually talking about things like Daypop, Technorati and Trackback. The blogosphere is good at disseminating information through the creation of RSS feeds and services like Blogdex and Feedster. And we permalink, which is good. (It’s even better when your permalinks are actually permanent, by the way.)

The Pew Internet Project says between 2% and 7% of American Internet users have blogs, and 11% read them. Meanwhile, Cyberatlas reports 2.4 to 2.9 million blogs as of June of 2003, but only half are active. Perseus, meanwhile, reports 4.12 million blogs, but only a third of them are active.

Bar-Ilan browsed “topic-oriented” blogs over the course of two months late last year. They included three library and information science blogs, three on networking and social science, three Web-oriented blogs, three computer-science blogs, and three usability blogs. She tracked statistics on updates and links. The average number of posts per day ranged from 0.11 to 2.74. Maximum number of posts in one day was 11. All of those sampled took at least a day off. (So we do have lives. huh.) Range of links per post went from 0.54 to 3.65, ranging up to 31. Comments were disabled in 7 blogs. Where in academia the saying goes “Publish or perish,” she suggests for the blogosphere: “Link and be linked or perish.” Only one single blog commonly didn’t link to anything or anyone else.

Sebastian Paquet’s blog (which was at the top of almost all of these ranges) had 335 inbound links, closely followed by Aaron Swartz’s Google blog with 325. For all but one, the majority of the posts were topic-oriented. Four of the fifteen had extensive postings, while the others were shorter.

Of the links, 13.4% linked to news. Another 12.9% linked to a content site or page, 12% to blogs, and 6.4% to specific blog entries. Some 27.6% of linking blog entries had a quote, and 35.8% had some kind of discussion or comment on the target.

In her conclusion, she says “We still do not know why people read blogs, but we can recommend reading professional, topic-oriented blogs.” (Man, I need to submit for next year.)