Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I don’t usually write about myself, but today I’ll make an exception for two reasons. One, I haven’t been home in more than a year, so it’s a big event. Two, Kelly is in California right now, soaking up the sun, and I know she’d love to hear about it.

So today I woke up to granola. Usually I skip breakfast or eat something disgusting and sugar–such as poptarts–but today was special, nutritious. That’s a good start to any day. After my shower, my sister pleaded me to watch some borrowed Cowboy Bebop, a classic anime about down-on-their-luck bounty hunters. So we watched two episodes before the grandparents came. Some chitchat, then lunch.

And not just any lunch! Keish!! Vegetables!! Home-baked bread!! I think I’m going to import my mother to Cornell.

After lunch we (my two sisters and mother) played Scrabble: I lost. The older of my two younger sisters beat me by about 20 points, because they wouldn’t allow me to make “juned” a legitimate archaic form of “joined.” Oh well… I will triumph again someday!

Then dinner. Apparently my mother was feeling pressure to be Chinese, because she cooked stirfry chicken with rice and vegetables, although not quite asian-style, like Kelly makes it. Again–the food was awesome.

Then my brother decided he wanted to take us to a computer game arcade. Dad and I played Halo and Half Life 2 with him. It was funny, since my Dad never plays games. He sorta wandered around the first level mostly getting killed. On the second one, we teamed up, and once I got him in the drivers seat of a Jeep, we shot my brother down every time. He was even better in the gunner’s seat!

And now, I’m writing this entry.

I’m at home on break in Phoenix now. If posts are spotty, it’s because I’m enjoying the next two and a half weeks!

Wondering how people name their blogs is an old question, never answered to my satisfaction. Fortunately the Blogwise directory hosts a list of 33810 blogs. Extracting the names of each blog from the directory itself took some work, but the result is this text file of blog names, one per line. Now that I got the raw data, it’s time to go to work.

Quickly coding a solution in C#, I wrote a program to tokenize the blog names by whitespace and punctuation, and place the resulting words in a hashmap for counting purposes. This gives a tab-delimited (paste into Excel!) text file of words used in blog titles and their frequency. Here’s the top 10 breakdown:

The top word, used in 9.986 percent of the blogs surveyed was “blog.” The next most popular, at 2.619 percent, is “life.” Here’s the top 10 words in a blog’s name:

1. blog – 9.986%
2. life – 2.619%
3. weblog – 1.841%
4. world – 1.296%
5. from – 1.226%
6. journal – 1.139%
7. news – 1.087%
8. thoughts – 1.039%
9. with – 0.670%
10. daily – 0.660%

This leads me to conclude that any blog named, “My blog/journal/weblog with daily world news and thoughts from life!” will be a smash hit. If you’re interested, here are the top 10 words from the Technorati popular blogs:

1. modblog
2. daily
3. girls
4. suicidegirls
5. nikki
6. weblog
7. media
8. from
9. page
10. boing

As you can see, there is little overlap between the top 100 blogs, and the population as a whole. Part of this is the tiny sample size–I don’t have enough blog names to harvest interesting words. The other part (which is pure speculation) is that unique blogs use unique words in their names. Continuing deeper into the data, a look at the top 750 words shows an interesting trend:

This is the famous “long tail.” Basically, some words are extremely popular in blog titles, and the rest of the words are ranked relatively equally, with a slow decreasing trend. Number 3045 and 6078 are only 1 mention apart, in the 33810 blogs surveyed. Here are the top 100 words used in popular blog titles:

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