Traffic Characteristics and Communication Patterns in Blogosphere A brilliant and insightful analysis of the access methods of the blogosphere community Peter Kamm

Overview Three Perspectives  Server View All Users, All Blogs  User View Individual User Perspective  Object View Individual Blog Perspective

Server View File transfer exhibits Pareto distribution Diurnal, bursty patterns Most blog traffic (~%40) from search engines

User View Search engines have little impact on blog popularity Power law relationship of “interest”

Object View Blog popularity follows power law Three blog types  Broadcast  Parlor  Register

Data Almost a terabyte of data spanning a full month Over 35 million server requests Extensive data on each request Eliminate crawlers and errors Even takes administrative requests into account

All Views Analyzed Takes all perspectives into account Useful for infrastructure side, user experience and social networking Broad scope

New Interesting Findings Search engine have little impact on object popularity Author/reader relationship categorization Blogosphere patterns more dependent on social networks than traditional web traffic

Relevance / Applications Synthetic traffic generation Track blog popularity using owner's social attributes not other pages pointing to it