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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.
by Patrix | on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 6:14 pm | 
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March 29th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
That’s an interesting statistics. But I would really be keen on finding out how these links stack up category wise - as in Politics, City Lights, Travel, photography, Technology, Humor etc. and within this list, a filter on the categories each Desipundit Contributor posted the links in. I believe this would give an idea of which Desipundit contributor favours which category, and if more than a certain percentage of Desipundit Contributors favour a few select categories, and if those few categories in turn have fewer good bloggers then those few bloggers will feature many times, and moreover this would bring up the question as to whether the Contributor list is representative enough in terms of individual tastes to actually sift the ‘good writing’ out there in other categories.
The answer to Sepia Mutiny’s overwhelming presence might lie in this “bias” towards a certain kind of writing in a certain kind of category.
This is just a thought.
March 29th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Anil, the number of links per category is readily available at the DesiPundit Archives page. I love digging into statistics and numbers but sometimes I have to restrain myself from overdoing it lest it takes my eye off the ball. I have always tried inviting bloggers from different backgrounds, ideologies, and tastes to link on DesiPundit although my personal taste admittedly affects that judgment.
But so far, I am satisfied with the variety that each contributor links to and even if they don’t, the combined whole provides a varied enough mix of links. Other factors like frequency at which a particular contributor posts also largely determines the posts offered by DesiPundit. But trying to micromanage everything will ruin it.
March 29th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
Hmm… Interesting reading. More interesting is the list of sites that DP linked to. I was surprised to see a ‘blog’ that goes by the url http://www.google.co.in in that list! I mean, promoting quality blog writing is one thing, promoting an internet behemoth is totally a different thing :)
Anyways, I always thought the so called A-listers with all their fame would collaborate with one another to form a cartel and (like most corporate scenarios) in the free market called the blogosphere would form an evil empire monopolizing, dominating and eating up all the traffic!
Makes for a nice story line/conspiracy theory, doesn’t it? :)
March 29th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Super! The data only confirms what we all believed. Patrix, you should consider this as an alternate tagline: “DesiPundit: as diverse as India!”
March 29th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
[...] defends the long and glorius DesiPundit [...]
March 30th, 2007 at 1:30 am
May “God/FSM bless them” ! Hahaha. May they all keep typing away with their noodly appendages.
March 30th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
[...] and comes up with some detailed and surprising results. More details of his results and methods over at my blog. DesiPundit Reader Survey results coming up [...]
March 30th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Vijay Krishna, That conclusion cannot be drawn, because data doesnt show the regional dispersion of the links, and qualitative nature of the posts. There can be 600 blogs linked with majority of them dealing with mumbai/delhi/calcutta etc. The conclusion ur drawing cannot be made. U dont have sufficient information to draw that.
March 30th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Piker, heh. That Google.co.in link was when Google had the Indian flag in their logo. Considering that Google gives us so much link love, our one solitary link is hardly a promotion.
Regarding the evil conspiracy about so-called cartel, well, let us keep that for another day of discussion.
Vijay, I’m just satisfied that we link to more unique blogs that I had ever imagined.
Ashish, gotta keep my loyal fan base that believes in the FSM happy, right? :)
Vatsan, you’re right. But then again most of the blogs are written from the major cities. hopefully we’ll have more blogs from the mofussil areas soon.
March 30th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
The list has my blog (www.prettybluesalwar.blogspot.com)as one which DP has linked to twice, but DP has linked to it three times. Once here, once here, and once here.
Is it because one of the three tips was a submit, and the other two were pulls?
Just curious, and to see if submits were included in the rankings.
March 31st, 2007 at 9:29 am
Blue, I see that your third link was on 18th Feb. The cron job wasn’t running then and probably was restarted only in March. It doesn’t matter how the link was obtained, once it is on DesiPundit, it is recorded.
April 4th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
[...] back to the question of variety of links on DesiPundit, I pointed you toward Thejo’s innovative tool to track outbound DesiPundit links. I guess, the majority of our readers were already ahead on the curve and were satisfied with the [...]