Basically what the team at UMBC did was compile aggregate data on from all public users on Bloglines. The data is rich. Despite the latest salvo from Google, Bloglines remains the most popular feed reader.
UMBC identified 83,000 publicly listed Bloglines users that have a combined 2,786,687 feed subscriptions. Some 35% of these publicly listed users organize their feeds into folders. On an average there are about 20 feeds in each of these folders.
With the data crunched, UMBC organized Bloglines user feeds into a tag cloud. Click on a tag and you will drill down into the most popular feeds filed under the subject. Some of the most popular folders users create on Bloglines include the obvious (Google, entertainment, marketing). However, there are some surprising categories that are big too (knitting and art for example).
There's more. UMBC has created a feed recommender. Pop in a feed you like and using the data it will find others just like it. I can't get it to work right now, but I love this concept.
In addition, there's amazing data on Bloglines users. This analysis revealed that most users have 30-100 feeds. So why is this important? Well, as the blogosphere continues to grow and does the number of people who follow blogs, the number of feeds that people subscribe to is actually a small fraction of the entire pie. They say: "The number of feeds that really matter doubles each year as opposed to the size of the blogosphere, which doubles every 6 months." Also notable is their analysis on blog platform data. Blogspot is the platform of choice for many popular feeds.
I still take issue with the term Feed That Matter. They all matter. However, it's clear that there's a small group of feeds that have much more appeal than others. And the data that UMBC compiled is outstanding. Give it a look.
Tags: bloglines, feeds, data, statistics
