What are we talking about? Part II.
May 12, 2008 — BrendanA week ago I published the results of tag analysis of the blogs in the PR Friendly Index. I put together a social network diagram which showed how the blogs in the index related to the tags they used. It made for some interesting results - so go and read that post now if you’re interested!
I said I’d be publishing some more analysis, so here we have it - the frequency with which tags are used. Click any tag to go to Technorati and see who else uses it:
(Note these are all in lower case quite simply because they look pretty that way. In the social media network I put them in upper case to distinguish them from the blog addresses. I hope this doesn’t cause confusion - it’s aesthetics over informatics, I’m afraid. Note also that this was after some data scrubbing to standardise the ‘onomies’ a little, and that two of the blogs I mentioned in the previous post have since accounted for anomalies in their results.)
We would expect PR to be at the top. I guess we would expect marketing and media to be there too. But I am (pleasantly) surprised that social media is a healthy second place, and blogging is just below that. This is reflected in the social network diagram, in that PR and social media are the two largest and most central nodes (that is, the greatest number of blogs link to them).
I suppose this makes sense given that PR bloggers would tend to be, by definition, more aware of social media and blogging. But I do wonder what this study would have revealed, say, a year ago? Two years? And looking ahead, how will this change? A sneaking part of me wonders whether blogging will decline in popularity and social networks will rise. Perhaps Facebook will usurp it?
It looks like we have a long tail here. Let’s use Many Eyes again to show this - and you can either go to Many Eyes to see the original chart, or just click the image below:
As with the social network data, the data for this is publicly available on Many Eyes. Feel free to take this and do whatever you like with it!
Finally, I would like to ask what exactly PRfung is all about? I was surprised when it first emerged, but even more surprised to see it emerge four times. I mean, really? What is PRfung? We need to know. Or at least, I need to know. Quite frankly I’m afraid to type it into Google…
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May 13, 2008 at 8:42 am
Wow. Fascinating analysis. When I blog, I wonder about tagging “PR” or “Public Relations” and end up tagging both. I think this list would be different if bloggers were required to use only one tag.
May 13, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Hi David,
Thanks!
I did quite a bit of ‘data scrubbing’ to account for this, if you look at the first post on this subject. I think it’s fair to reduce instances of, say, ‘public relations’, public_relations’ etc down to PR, because they’re the same thing, just expressed inconsistently. This is, of course, the big problem with tags anyway - people tag the same things in different ways, or indeed different things in the same way!
May 18, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Very impressive analysis, and gives you food for thought with tagging strategies. Thanks also for documenting your methodology.