Boing Boing Analysis - Part 4

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2006

This continues our analysis of posts from the weblog Boing Boing. Today we will look at outbound links from posts and acronym use.

This first graph shows the familiar set of bar graphs showing posts by the various authors over time. This time, however, the bars are coloured to show the average number of outbound links per post. There are some interesting patterns here. Cory averaged around 2.5 links/post from 4Q 2001 - 2Q 2003, dropped down to 1.7 for most of 2003-2004, but then recovered more recently. Xeni was atypical once again in that her posts averaged noticeably more outbound links than the other authors. Since she started posted the average was in the range 4-5 outbound links/post. David has gradually increased his links/post over time and Mark averages a bit fewer than the others.

For this next part of the analysis the use of acronyms were measured within the posts. An acronym for the purposes of this study had 3 or more uppercase alphabetic characters without intervening punctuation.

The most common acronym was determined for each post. This graph shows the breakdown of this acronym usage for the various authors. Unusually high usage for the various authors are as follows:
Cory - DRM, EFF, RIAA, RSS, DMCA, USB, ETCON, WIPO
Xeni - NPR, CNN, NASA, SARS
Mark - none really
David - BBC, MIT, MAKE
Cory's acronym usage clearly reflects his interest in the area of Digital Rights Management & copyright.

Related Links:

Boing Boing Analysis - Part 1 (Posts Over Time by Author)
Boing Boing Analysis - Part 2 (Posts Breakdown over Day of Week)
Boing Boing Analysis - Part 3 (Images/Post over time by Author)
Boing Boing Analysis - Part 4 (Outbound Links/Post and Acronym use by Author)
Boing Boing Analysis - Part 5 (Topic Hierarchy)
Boing Boing Analysis - Part 6 (Topic Emphasis by Author)
Boing Boing Analysis - Part 7 (Images/Post for Topics and Topic Share over Time)
Boing Boing Analysis - Part 8 (Incoming Links)

 


Boing Boing Analysis - Part 3
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Thanks for the Link, Boing Boing !