Bloglines users are a load of knitters

A few weeks ago Louise Ferguson wrote about how her City Of Bits feed was being categorised by bloglines users.

This got me thinking. It wouldn't be too hard to write a scraper that took all of the publicly available subscription and folder information from bloglines, do some analysis on it and produce some reports on how people were categorising feeds on bloglines. This would fit in well with my other data liberation projects.

Four weeks later, after a few late nights I have got the first results from my analysis, and I have made a very important discovery.

Bloglines users appear to like knitting!

After producing a list of the top 100 folder names subscribed to on bloglines I found the usual suspects at the top "Blogs, news, tech, people, politics" etc. etc. But then at number 37, I found a folder called "Knitting" that had been used for 2,085 feeds.

This is only the first delivery of bloglines stats and I will be producing a lot more stuff in the future.

Growth

The data I have scraped covers the period from 1st July 2003 to 8th April 2004.

Bloglines was launched on 1st July 2003 and you can see the founders public subscriptions here.

I have got data on 32,415 public subscribers and their 1,059,140 public subscriptions.

Activity

I have looked at the data on subscriber activity as well.
The chart below shows how many days subscribers are active for. I am defining activity as being the process of subscribing to feeds.

6,880 (21%) of all public subscribers were only active for one day. This means that these people subscribed to one or more feeds on a specific day and then never subscribed to any more feeds again. Of course they may have been reading those feeds since, but I can't get any data on reading activity.

Categorisation

324,319 (30%) of public subscriptions not in a folder.
734,821 (70%) of public subscriptions are in a folder.

Users have created 29,279 differently named folders.

This chart shows the relationship between number of subscriptions and number of folders.

And of course, don't forget to look at the list of the top 100 folders. (I have still got to do something with the other 29,179 folders).

I will be producing charts that show what subscriptions are in a particular folder, so the chart for the "Knitting" folder will look a bit like this:

There will also be reports for specific feeds showing which folders they appear in:

Here is one for Louise Ferguson (City Of Bits):
(The top entry is for people who have subscribed to it without categorising it. The number is the number of times it has been categorised in that folder.)

Tom Smith (OTHER Blog):

John Rhodes (Webword):

Lou Rosenfeld (Bloug):

Peter Merholz (Peterme):

Edward Tufte (Ask ET):

Nick Finck (Digital Web):

And I may even have some time to generate some unfashionable tag clouds as well.

And just in case anyone is still reading, I have come up with an alternative to "Folksonomy", as I really don't like the term very much. After a few weeks thought the alternative I have come up with is "Usersaurus". It works for me on many levels.

(Oh, and I also need to sort out the 'duplicated' feed issue of more than one bloglines ID for one site feed).

See Also: del.icio.us references

Comments

[Computerization]

i can't find what "CountOfBlogID" indicates either, please clear it out Mr. data liberation

[newsfree]

Bloglines lover, do you want seamless synchronization with bloglines via newsreader?
Then Check out greatnews man(http://www.curiostudio.com/).
There’s 4 major reasons why I love it:
1. It synchronizes with bloglins. Folder hierarchy is synchronized between Bloglines and Greatnews as well. you feel really comfortable to organize your feeds. You know how it sucks for feeddemon to synchronize with bloglines. Cause feeddemon only imports opml from bloglines without Folder hierarchy at all. So it’s a very hard for me to find a specfic feed and to organize those feeds. In all the desktop news clients, Greatnews’s synchronization with bloglines leaves rest news aggregators in dust. It’s like use outlook express to receive hotmail. Once you receive all the news from bloglines server in greatnews, all the news will be flagged read on bloglines online edition.If you love bloglines, you feel at home. Cause the interface and fold hierarchy looks the same like bloglines online version.
2. It’s extremely small. It only takes 800kb or so to install. You can even install it on a usb flash drive or even a floppy disk. So you take it everywhere to connect to Pc to use it. How cool is that?! It’s like you have yourself own mini newsgator server which can gurantee you won’t read the same news twice.
3. It runs with only a tiny memory and cpu engaged. So you won’t even notice it when it updates news in the background.
Above all it’s free.

You can configure greatnews to use firefox by option–>usability. Tick box before ‘open rss link in external default browser’.
As in your case, firefox is your default one.
You can also use it as outlook style by ticking view–>news list.
After that, once you click on a special feed, you will see all the news you received are displayed in a pane one by one as every single email item looklike.

There are still some sweet points about greatnews I can tell you below just in case you can put a relevant review in your website to let more people to be aware of a sweet piece of software, to less their pain of losing feeddemon.Here we go:
* 100% Unicode support. Displays international languages on the same page. Use any languages anywhere in GreatNews, including Search, Label and News watch. Like I read japanese news to do a research, greatnews displays all these south asian news so well including japanese, Chinese, whatevernese. Feeddemon can’t do this . As far as I know, feeddemon can’t support hebrew news,japanese news, and chinese news well.
** Full text search with keyword highlights. It’s very productive when you consider get things done.
* Integrated internet browser, with popup blocking. Working closely with default browser like Firefox. A kill point to please firefox fan.
* “Channel Organizer” helps organize channel subscriptions in one place. Use “Find Channel” to locate your subscriptions quickly. Again a great get things done tool.
* With Import/Export wizard, you can import/export all channel subscriptions in a single step.
* Export rss articles to rss 2.0 format. You can also customize the export by selecting channel/group/label, and/or applying filters.
*you can use ’search channel’ to keep eyes on special subject like ‘Ipod’, Like using feeddemon’s search channel and newsgator’s smart feeds. The difference is that smart feeds isn’t free but greatnews is.
There’s 4 major reasons why I love it:
1. It synchronizes with bloglins. Folder hierarchy is synchronized between Bloglines and Greatnews as well. you feel really comfortable to organize your feeds. You know how it sucks for feeddemon to synchronize with bloglines. Cause feeddemon only imports opml from bloglines without Folder hierarchy at all. So it’s a very hard for me to find a specfic feed and to organize those feeds. In all the desktop news clients, Greatnews’s synchronization with bloglines leaves rest news aggregators in dust. It’s like use outlook express to receive hotmail. Once you receive all the news from bloglines server in greatnews, all the news will be flagged read on bloglines online edition.If you love bloglines, you feel at home.
2. It’s extremely small. It only takes 800kb or so to install. You can even install it on a usb flash drive or even a floppy disk. So you take it everywhere to connect to Pc to use it. How cool is that?! It’s like you have yourself own mini newsgator server which can gurantee you won’t read the same news twice.
3. It runs with only a tiny memory and cpu engaged. So you won’t even notice it when it updates news in the background.
Above all it’s free.

You can configure greatnews to use firefox by option–>usability. Tick box before ‘open rss link in external default browser’.
As in your case, firefox is your default one.
You can also use it as outlook style by ticking view–>news list.
After that, once you click on a special feed, you will see all the news you received are displayed in a pane one by one as every single email item looklike.

There are still some sweet points about greatnews I can tell you below just in case you can put a relevant review in your website to let more people to be aware of a sweet piece of software, to less their pain of losing feeddemon.Here we go:
* 100% Unicode support. Displays international languages on the same page. Use any languages anywhere in GreatNews, including Search, Label and News watch. Like I read japanese news to do a research, greatnews displays all these south asian news so well including japanese, Chinese, whatevernese. Feeddemon can’t do this . As far as I know, feeddemon can’t support hebrew news,japanese news, and chinese news well.
** Full text search with keyword highlights. It’s very productive when you consider get things done.
* Integrated internet browser, with popup blocking. Working closely with default browser like Firefox. A kill point to please firefox fan.
* “Channel Organizer” helps organize channel subscriptions in one place. Use “Find Channel” to locate your subscriptions quickly. Again a great get things done tool.
* With Import/Export wizard, you can import/export all channel subscriptions in a single step.
* Export rss articles to rss 2.0 format. You can also customize the export by selecting channel/group/label, and/or applying filters.
*you can use ’search channel’ to keep eyes on special subject like ‘Ipod’, Like using feeddemon’s search channel and newsgator’s smart feeds. The difference is that smart feeds isn’t free but greatnews is.

[Colleen]

I should probably understand this better than I do, but what do the categories mean? For example, what does "CountOfBlogID" indicate?

[andrea]

not only is #37 'knitting' but #14 is 'RAOK', an acronym for the knitting ring Random Acts Of Kindness -- more info here: http://www.ringsurf.com/netring?action=list&ring=Vidardottir

go knitting! ;)

[Jason]

Personally, I think your missing a far better categorisation: Useranus ?