TechCrunch Analysis Part II

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008

My last post explored the company and product names discussed on TechCrunch and how they varied over time. The number of posts written by the various authors and how it varied over time was also illustrated. An obvious follow-up analysis is to look at the interaction between author and company/product names. Do certain TechCrunch authors specialize in writing about particular companies or products ? Or do some authors avoid specific domains ?

I've done this analysis and presented the results below. For each of the top 6 authors and top 60 names the number of times each author used each name was determined. The first graph shows the breakdown for the top 10 names. The second has the same form and shows numbers 11-60 but I've broken it into a separate graph because it uses a different scale. This lets us see more details for these names. I have also colored the bars to show proportional use of the names. A deep blue color means that the name was used proportionally much more often for that author and a deep red shows that it was used proportionally much less often. Paler colors indicate a lesser degree of high(blue) or low(red) usage.

Click on the images to see larger views Top 10 TechCrunch Names Author Breakdown
 
11-60 TechCrunch Names Author Breakdown

Some things that I spotted quickly from the larger version of the top 10 graphic include:

  1. There aren't too many names that were discussed a lot more by a particular author - no deep blues
  2. Perhaps the deepest blue in the graphic shows that Hendrickson discussed FaceBook proportionally more than the others
  3. Unusually low (deeper red) combinations are Schonfeld-Digg, Kirkpatrick-FaceBook, and to a lesser degree Gonzalez-Microsoft and Hendrickson-Microsoft
Some of the notable features in the 11-60 graphic are:
  1. Arrington discusses Life (as in Second Life, Yahoo Life, Online Life, various others), VOIP, Adsense, Silverlight, and P2P proportionally less than average
  2. High proportional names for Riley include Twitter, Life, Windows, and Silverlight
  3. Low proportional names for Riley include RSS, Flash, Zoho, AJAX, Salesforce, NetVibes, and Wikia
  4. High proportional names for Schonfeld include Comscore, Bebo, Salesforce, and especially OpenSocial
  5. Low proportional names for Schonfeld include RSS, Life, API, URL, Ning, photobucket, and a few more
  6. Other high proportional pairings are Kirkpatrick-RSS and IM, Gonzalez-VOIP and Zoho, Hendrickson-Bebo,Ning,Hulu and OpenSocial
Some of these differences in proportional frequency of references are likely due to the fact that certain companies and products were discussed a lot in particular periods of time and the number of articles posted by the various authors varied a lot over the time period. For example, Twitter wasn't really mentioned on TechCrunch until around Feb 2007 which was around the time Marshall Kirkpatrick stopped posting so it isn't suprising that he didn't mention Twitter hardly at all.

The data for this analysis was kindly provided by Yuvi from The StatBot.

 


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