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What do YOU call your blog?

Posted in How to Blog by Elliott Back on December 21st, 2004. [Del.icio.us]

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:

1. blog
2. life
3. weblog
4. world
5. from
6. journal
7. news
8. thoughts
9. with
10. daily
11. girl
12. mind
13. what
14. this
15. diary
16. musings
17. online
18. about
19. just
20. ramblings
21. random
22. your
23. adult
24. love
25. content
26. little
27. that
28. home
29. blue
30. time
31. marketing
32. blogs
33. right
34. digital
35. things
36. city
37. rants
38. internet
39. like
40. free
41. journey
42. words
43. business
44. more
45. notes
46. place
47. real
48. house
49. american
50. view
51. stuff
52. music
53. black
54. chronicles
55. tales
56. times
57. diario
58. dreams
59. another
60. adventures
61. inside
62. corner
63. other
64. photoblog
65. confessions
66. book
67. living
68. soul
69. head
70. heart
71. search
72. truth
73. live
74. reality
75. good
76. brain
77. here
78. vida
79. geek
80. through
81. eyes
82. thought
83. blogging
84. politics
85. personal
86. page
87. site
88. days
89. dream
90. john
91. thinking
92. have
93. left
94. road
95. something
96. lost
97. project
98. into
99. media
100. where
101. design
102. conservative
103. star
104. mundo

The rankings go a little bit over 100, because the last few entries are all used with equal frequency.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 21st, 2004 at 9:42 am and is tagged with blog, suicidegirls, blogs, blogwise, technorati, fortunately, weblog, modblog, basically, smash hit, trend number, interesting words, raw data, hashmap, time to go, delimited, whitespace, boing, punctuation, nikki. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.