BlogPulse 2005 Year in Review

What was hot in the blogosphere in 2005? Politics took a back seat to entertainment, technology, natural disaster and media discussions, according to BlogPulse's review of blogging in 2005. BlogPulse scoured a year's worth of blog posts, links and trends to summarize and illustrate the year in blogging—what, why and how and in what order.

BlogPulse Research Feature

BlogPulse senior researcher Natalie Glance has co-authored The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog , a paper examining the degree of interaction and behavior among top conservative & liberal political bloggers during the Nov. Presidential election. Learn more >

BlogPulse Tsunami Crisis Coverage

An earthquake and tsunami devastated wide areas of Southern Asia on Dec. 26, 2004. As neighboring nations and relief agencies began organizing to help, so did another group of people: bloggers. Unlimited by geography and powered by easy blog-publishing tools, bloggers quickly sprang into action to provide information that was otherwise impossible or extremely difficult to find. In a remote part of the world, where traditional news crews wouldn't arrive for several days, bloggers provided some of the first eyewitness accounts, news of relief efforts, videos, still photographs, lists of victims and missing persons, and other helpful disaster aid and coordination information. View BlogPulse's analysis of tsunami-related coverage in the blogsphere.

BlogPulse 2004 Year in Review

What do George Bush, singing llamas, comedian Jon Stewart and a blog called Boing Boing have in common? They were some of the most discussed people, features and trends in the blogging world in 2004. And today, Nielsen BuzzMetrics's BlogPulse.com web site features an entirely new section that reviews, with charts, links and graphs, the most commonly cited and linked-to items in the Blogosphere in 2004. Check it out for yourself!

BlogPulse Campaign Radar 2004

During the fall 2004 Presidential election campaign, BlogPulse mined and analyzed politics-specific data in a variety of ways. The Campaign Radar 2004 Summary page summarizes the findings, trends and insights from that analysis. It includes lists of the top blogs, media sources and web sites cited most frequently in blogs, and graphs that track blog buzz around key events, issues, personalities and tactics.

HP's Blog Epidemic Analyzer

Researchers from the Information Dynamics Lab at HP hypothesize that ideas spread through the blogsphere via the same kinds of mechanisms that viral epidemics spread through society. They have analyzed BlogPulse data to infer common patterns of infection. Here is a sample graph demonstrating how the long-running "spambayes" meme propagated. Edge colors are red for "via" links, blue for explicit links, and green for inferred links. To search for other examples of "information epidemics," try out the demo version of their Blog Epidemic Analyzer.

Global Attention Profiles, Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman is carrying out research into the relationship between media attention given to a country and economic and developmental factors. He visualizes this relationship by producing maps that indicate degree of attention (red is high attention, blue is low) over time. Ethan is using BlogPulse data to apply his analyses to the blogosphere.