Power Laws in Blog Memes

This is post is part of an ongoing series on corporate blogs based on data I collected for my Masters thesis. It’s been a while since I last posted in this series and when I was writing the last post I realized how difficult it was to describe any one cut of data in isolation. For these reasons, I wanted to provide a recap of the previous few posts on the size and structure of blog memes before moving on to my findings on sentiment.

In an ideal world, I would have liked to have created something more visual but here is the time-limited version:

• 389 Fortune 500 corporate blogs were studied and they produced 5,887 posts in the two-month data collection period.

• The top three companies, Google, HP, and Yahoo accounted for more than a third of the 389 blogs.

• 21% of the 389 corporate blogs did not post at all in the two-months. Almost half (49%) posted no more than 5 times.

• Only 299 (5%) of the 5,887 corporate posts produced memes as they were measured for my study.

• Only 14 Fortune 500 companies out of the 76 that used blogs produced memes and most were in technology-related industries.

• The most active company, Google, accounted for almost half of memes by itself.

• The most connected blog post had 17 incoming links from other posts but 89% had one or none.

• The largest meme reached 56 posts but 88% of memes contained no more than ten. Just over half of these memes were comprised of the minimum two posts, and 240 out of 299 were only two tiers deep.

• There were 792 distinct blogs found participating in memes, but 79% only appeared once and 95% appeared no more than three times.

This little recap is a long way of saying that power laws were present in most cuts of the data. The presence of power laws in social networks has been known for some time and this data represents another example.

It makes analyzing the data for patterns more complex, but potentially more rewarding, than data that follows a normal (bell-curve) distribution and there are plenty of much smarter people working on ways to do that.

Posted on September 11, 2009