Nerve Endings Firing Away

The perennial complaint against DesiPundit is that we don’t link to enough distinct blogs and seem to have a choice few favorites that we love flaunting as the best of the Indian (desi?) blogosphere. We freely admit that the tag of ‘best of the Indian blogosphere’ is largely subjective to our tastes but isn’t that the true nature of the blogosphere? Anyway moving along to the topic of this post and getting back to the favorite ‘complaint’. Does DesiPundit display deep rooted favoritism toward certain blogs or better still, does it irrationally prejudice against some? Yes, you do! No, we do not (wait, do we?) – we can go on all day but then let the numbers do the talking.

Thejovardhana (I know, what a royal name) S.K., one of our readers dug a little deeper in trying to test the theory of DesiPundit’s so-called biases. Nope, we didn’t ask him to. That’s one thing we love about our readers (God/FSM bless them) – they are enterprising and often surprise us. It reminds me of a time when yet another reader ran an Adwords campaign for us – with his money. But I digress. In trying to understand “where links go to, who links to whom, how frequently, etc” [via email] on high traffic link blogs, Thejo ran a cron job with the DesiPundit database/feed to analyze our linking behavior. The results frankly surprised me. Perhaps I may have secretly believed that the criticism was valid to an extent, and I justified it by saying that quality writing would tend to be linked frequently.

The complete analysis can be found over at Thejo’s domain. The period for which this data was collected is August – October 2006 and March 2007 onward. Thejo has done an excellent job enhanced largely by a quick rudimentary UI. I was introduced to Thejo by our erstwhile DesiPundit contributor Vijay Krishna. Briefly explained, the first page lists all the blogs linked by DesiPundit in the period mentioned with the number of links in parenthesis. When you click on an individual blog, it will list all the posts with DesiPundit permalinks in chronological order.

At first glance, the bias accusation seems valid with twenty three posts by Sepia Mutiny (ignore the internal links to DesiPundit, those are our occasional admin posts) but as you scroll down, the ‘long tail’ becomes more apparent. Thejo counts 667 (actually 669) distinct blogs/sites linked in the above mentioned period from 1089 links within 1071 posts on DesiPundit. So effectively, every other link on DesiPundit is to a distinct blog. That’s not bad, right? In fact, it is pretty sweet.

Of course, you see the so-called favorites like Sunil’s Balancing Life, Jai Arjun, Great Bong, Atanu Dey, Falstaff, Rashmi Bansal, etc. at the top with 5 or more links but frankly, almost all of their posts are link-worthy (I think so.) They have a strong enough readership base too and had so even before DesiPundit existed. But the real joy of such a list comes as you scroll down to the blogs linked to three or less times. That list is huge! In fact, there are only 49 blogs in the list that are linked four or more times.

That said, I am aware that 669 blogs is by no measure representative of India’s bludgeoning blogosphere. But our contributors and tip line constantly seeks new blogs. In fact, if a blog has not been featured on DesiPundit before, it even jumps the line. The various Digg-like sites also do an admirable job of providing filtered content from blogs. But we know you go to DesiPundit for our snarky personal comments that accompany each link, right? Or maybe not. Our readership hasn’t declined in spite of many filter blogs popping up and perhaps that is indicative of unmet needs for filter blogs. DesiPundit’s contributors have done an excellent job of staying on top of things after the brief hiccup late last year.

Also, data collected over four months from DesiPundit’s almost-two years in existence may not be representative enough of our linking behavior. But this analysis is an ongoing process and Thejo assures me that he’ll keep it running after having restarted it last month. I’ll be definitely checking back often to see how we are doing. Feel free to dissect, contest, or rehash the data. Email me or drop in comments on any aspect that jumps out at you.

Next up, results from the DesiPundit Reader Survey.