University Study Reveals Rich Data on Bloglines Feeds

Feeds That Matter is a fascinating new analysis project out of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and a terrific way to find new RSS feeds to subscribe to. (Though, I think the name needs work since all feeds matter.) The project leverages the wisdom of crowds and Bloglines data to zero in high quality feeds on a given topic. There's also lots of great data on the feeds that Bloglines users subscribe to.

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

Comments

[bytehead]

Interesting. As one data point, I've got 964 feeds in 38 folders in my Bloglines account.

One of these times I'm going to have to go through and prune the bad stuff out. The flip side is that I don't often add new feeds just because I'm spending enough time on Bloglines as it is. I have learned the habit of clicking on one folder and then immediately clicking on another folder just to skip that topic (Shopping as I'm not looking for anything right now, and Politics, as my blood pressure is too high to begin with).

It looks like I'm not the typical feed user either. That's almost scary.

And I agree, all feeds matter.

[engtech]

Very cool find. Too bad most of their site is broken at the moment (bad permissions on their CGI scripts, etc).

There's also some bugs (43folders.com shows up multiple times under the productivity tag), but in general this could be very useful.

I only have around 70 feeds in bloglines. I tried the Google Reader switch but I found that a) river of news makes you want to unsubscribe from prolific feeds that have too much noise-to-signal and b) there's a bug where you can't unsubscribe from feeds.

[Ed Terpening]

As an artist, I found their list of feeds way off. Digital Camera reviews? Google's Weblog? Come on.