I'm really not a metablogger because I'm focused on content delivery. Therefore my blog is really a CMS or a portal (I missed my calling in sales). The lower cased one has really been giving me headaches about my lack of posting. He knows how much I really want to post. I just am short of time. He too is short of time as he prepares for his presentation here (let me guess, blah, blah, blah, speech, blah, blah, blah, Tablet . . .). I've invited all of my friends, so we are hopeful that at least two people will show. I'm just curious if he's got as much swag as Tech Ed. People aren't going to just show up if you don't hand out the bling (dangit, do arbs care about swag; or is it another asset class?).
But the real reason that I mention the lower cased one is that he helped me with an abstraction. Blogging about metablogging is metametablogging. Blogging about metametablogging is metametametablogging. He went a few layers deeper and found that there was no google juice on metametametametametametametametablogging. In other words, I could get a number one ranking just by talking about it. Done.
But the real reason that I mention metablogging again is that I've read this post here. In my welcome, I specifically state:
"But I also believe that to find and collaborate with one's peers or to acquire new friendships and disciplines, one must communicate. Hence this blog. "
David Ing is one of those people who communicate. If you aren't subscribed, do it now. He's a clear thinker and even uses a metaphor here. He obviously went to the same school as I, because he doesn't warn you. He just is: verbose= on. His post about "Content" is a little confusing, though. I'm not certain if he means: con'-tent n. The subject matter of a written work, such as a book or magazine or con-tent' adj. Desiring no more than what one has; satisfied. When I read the post, he discusses blogging and that studies here show that it's not about the content, but about the links. So either he is content with the blogosphere, or he is discussing content (or discussing content contently).
So I'm calling him out here. We have a right to know . . .
Actually, I'm gonna call him out on this instead. In this post here, he states:
"(*) As part of English tax law I have to put at least one vaguely intelligent sounding but little known word into each blog entry."
That's a rule I live by and I didn't see the word in the "Content" post. My test was simple: I made the lower cased one read the post. He understood every word, so there weren't ANY vaguely intelligent words. I hereby call this test the LCOI (pick your own words for this acronym).
The good thing is that David is a straight shooter and reveals his identity. Unlike me, optionsScalper, ultra-pseudo-secret guy. By the way, for those of you following along, my real name, as of this post, appears at least 231 times in my blog. (Note to crypto spooks who follow this blog because it contains the word cryptography: Paranoid scalpers do good things, too).
Anyways, I was getting to a math problem. I love people that collect data and do bar-graphs so they can claim a conclusion. David is right on point. Let's review.
I'm going to grab a few excerpts from the post that David linked:
"Out in the blogosphere there’s this tiny little group of folks who care about how the Internet is changing and wish to better understand how we got to this point, and where we are going from here."
Ok, good, we are going to have a discussion on embriology. It's either that or it is a discussion on phylogeny. Perhaps the blogger will elaborate.
Also, please limit yourself to one diminutive per direct object (tiny little). If I could just get you to cut back just a smaller, teeny, tiny, little bit more that would be great.
"My conclusion is that most of the benefit of keeping up with A-listers comes from the “search value”—the sifting, sorting and filtering that A-listers perform when they present their picks for most important concepts or news items of the day."
Hang on. "Conclusion?" Do I need to read any further? Also, does anyone care to guess which mathematics terms "sifting", "sorting", and "filtering" are better known as? Hint: Take a trip to the land of RA. I also am trying to decide if we are discussing measurements here, i.e. "most of the benefit" infers that the blogger has decided that "benefit" is singular and therefore an aggregate measure of any characterized model.
"To dig deeper into this analysis, I wanted to quantify things a bit. So I decided to take a look at a full week’s worth of entries for a few of my favorite A-list peeps. For my experiment I chose three blogging rockstars:"
Ok, good, we have the words "experiment", "analysis" and "quantify". It looks like we're going to apply the scientific method. With "conclusion" from above, we have most of what we need, even if it is a little out of order. We also now know that we are measuring rockstars and peeps.
"I placed each blogger’s posts into six basic categories (with entries in multiple categories where appropriate, although there was very little overlap). The six categories describe most posts by my three blogeteers:"
Stop right there. I just discussed in my SMC the term "blogger". Now I find out that the town of Seville may have a blogger and a blogeteer? Why didn't someone tell me? Now I've got to redo that paradox thingy.
OK, now the article goes into some graphs after explaining the data that was captured. Ummmmmmmmmmmmm. Before I start my experiments, I usually have a HYPOTHESIS.
“why do people read this guy?”
I went backward and re-read this and found that this is the likely hypothesis. This means that we are studying embriology, not phylogeny. I'm glad the blogger clarified this.
"The A-listers are viewed by many as pundits or pontificators – but from my perspective these guys are not actually putting forth a whole lot in the way of declarative statements or analysis (at least not through their blogs). In fact I’d say they’re acting more like radio DJ’s (playing attractive mixes of someone else’s original content), rather than artists. (Note: I'm going to chime in on podcasting in a later post)"
The blogger used the word "pontificators". I have pontification=on, so this blogger is now my best friend. I forgive him for all of his bad math.
"If you read between the lines, it's all self-promotion."
This is the first comment on this post. No-duh. That must be the experiment's conclusion. I can see how in one basic statement, we wrap up all of the quantitative results and can summarize. Thanks for the insight, Mr. Commenter #1. I would have missed that had you not made such a clear argument to support the facts.
The following are terms that were ignored entirely in this study: "independent observations", "survivor bias", "statistical significance" (because we know "MSN Spaces has 96 gajillion active bloggers"), "law of large numbers" (because we know "MSN Spaces has 96 gajillion active bloggers"), "ordinary least square regression", and "conditional heteroskedasticity" (actually, not this, but it really adds to the drama and I am not GARCHman). As I said, this blogger used "pontificators", so I forgive him and absolve him of all sins in the eyes of the church of mathematics.
Ok, let's do a little real math.
Warning: Look the other way if you are blinded by math. You've been warned.
HYPOTHESIS: A blog is a collection of articles. The blogger's motivation is to construct a blog, such that it is the preferred path of navigation for content. This requires that the blogger provide the shortest path to the content for the interested party. This means that the outbound links from the blog are minimized to content (with shortest distance = 1) and that inbound links all point to the blog. In simpler terms "Why read this guy?"
Head's up graph theory guys and gals. This is a graph theory problem. Question 1: Do we have a directed graph? Question 2: Do we have an acyclic graph? Question 3: Are all edges in this problem equally weighted? Question 4: Do we get to play with markers and move this graph theory problem into RAMSEY THEORY? (My answers are: 1. Y, 2. N, 3. Y, 4: Y). Play along if you agree.
CHARACTERIZATION:
Let G = (V, A) be a directed graph. Let V be the set of posts that are in the blogosphere. Let A represent the set of edges that are directed from one post to another post, a.k.a. links in the posts. Let B be the set of blogs that contain subsets of V. Let each element v in V have an attribute c (content). Let positive integer K <= |A|.
Theorem 1
A post v in V must also be an element of B', where B' is a subset of B. The directed edge from v to an element w not in B' is constructed. Choose another element x not in B' that is not element w. Is there a set k <= K, such that there are paths from w to x in G? (Perhaps I'm not quite clear on my description. -5 scalper points).
This problem can be transformed from DIRECTED HAMILTONIAN CIRCUIT and is NP-COMPLETE. See Garey and Johnson's "Computers and Intractibility" for proof.
Theorems 2 - 27
Do you really want to see these? Since Theorem 1 is correct, the problem is not reducible from NP-COMPLETE.
CONCLUSION:
The last time I checked, google was working on this problem, i.e. go to www.google.com, type in your words, get answer. There is one edge between the google search and the content site. But, if you want, we could debate that because the problem moved into RAMSEY THEORY in theorem 7 and the cost to calculate the answer to the problem is BIG, the results of this study are likely inconclusive.
BETTER CONCLUSION:
If you read my SMC, I clearly state: "the study of the metablogger is the study in the methods of the solution for problems that are NP-Complete." While the math is difficult at best, the metablogger demonstrates the utility of the directed edges and the minimization of the path for content. If the metablogger can reduce someone's path to three edges, the NP-COMPLETE problem looks like a P problem because the solution search space is smaller.
The Scalper's Final Analysis
Metabloggers have utility. I genuinely believe this. I have already done my one (there can be only one) obligatory link to Scoble in the SMC that I have mentioned. The blogosphere is about finding useful or entertaining information. Metabloggers reduce the path, i.e. the number of edges to desired content.
So to the poster at adamnation.com: Your math is lousy (so is mine), but your heart is in the right place. You say the magic words: "who care about how the Internet is changing". That's good enough for me.
By David's criteria "..especially when we have nothing worthwhile to say.", I have failed. Perhaps I should use this instead.