Traffic Characteristics and Communication Patterns in Blogosphere By Fernando Duarte, Bernardo Mattos, Azer Bestavros, Virgilio Almeida, Jussara Almeida.

Traffic Characteristics and Communication Patterns

in BlogosphereBy Fernando Duarte, Bernardo Mattos, Azer Bestavros, Virgilio

Almeida, Jussara Almeida

Attacked by Ionut Trestian

Introduction – What are we looking at? (I)

Introduction – What are we looking at? (II)

• The paper will try to trick you with big numbers

• 200,000 distinct blogs out of an estimated of 60,000,000 world blogs in 2006.• That’s 0.33%

• Population of Brazil: approx 200,000,000

– That’s 3.33% out of 6,000,000,000

Motivation (I)

• At least the authors don’t give the usual motivation:

- “blogs important in politics, economy etc”

• This would actually be hard in fact of the figures we showed earlier

• Motivation is to study how blogs impact traffic

Motivation (II)

• Traffic engineering• Traffic engineering ???

• Last time I checked ISPs were more worried about clients doing streaming and costly downloads

• Or you want to kill the problem from its source?

Burstiness of access patterns ?

My point?

• The observed burstiness probably comes from external factors – events that trigger users discussion/information sharing

• But the paper never tries to correlate the observed behavior with these facts …

Search engines (I)

Search engines (II)

• Why change search engines by incorporating social information in Page-Rank?

• Search engines and Social Networks have 2 different functions:

– Search engines: finding content

– Social networks: finding what my friends are doing

• Imagine social networks as being bookmarks to your friends

Search engines (III)

• How do people who read get to these different types of blogs, isn’t that important?

– Broadcast probably list links to content

– Parlor is where the discussions take place

– Register ?

Search engines (IV)

• Also the authors never mention what attracted the search engine users to the blog in the first place

– Finding content – rapidshare links

– Getting tricked – spam

• Conclusion

– Terrible idea

– Most search engines ignore blogs anyway

– Makes sense to have both just the same way as most people use both bookmarks and search engines

Distributions (for Gregory)

Conclusions

• Motivation – almost non-existent

• Their Applications even more so …

– Generating blog traffic

– Modifying existing search engines