I’m a big fan of Matt Hurst, even if he’s rooting for the Czech Republic over the US in today’s match. (We had a long talk a couple days back about the algorithms people use to decide who to root for. As a Scot of English and Czech descent, married to a Japanese woman, and living in the US, he’s got as much complexity as I do when I figure out who to cheer for in the US/Ghana match next week.)
Matt knows me as a quantitative Internet researcher, something I’ve been doing a poor job of being lately, as Global Voices has been taking roughly 150% of my possible work hours. But Matt got a chance to hear me talk about Global Voices at the Annenberg conference, and was excited about what he heard – he’s responded with an interesting visualization of some Global Voices data.
Using feeds we’ve entered into Bloglines to help aggregate some of our favorite sources, Matt’s produced a visualization of many of the blogs we use to compile roundups. The bloglines data is several months old – for instance, we’re now tracking several great blogs from the DRC, which doesn’t appear on the map – but it still gives you a great sense for the global reach of the project. (My fault, not his – I’ll need to update that bloglines feed, or send Matt some better OPML.) Thanks, Matt.
We definitely need to give him some better data. To be honest I don’t think that bloglines aggregator has much to do with what gets covered on the GV blog at this point.. My fault as well.. we need to ask our editors to import their aggregator feeds.. or maybe we could create a map based on the GV country category feeds?
It’s exciting to have someone breaking down the raw numbers of Global Voices’ coverage, but Rebecca is right, that Bloglines data is representative of what we were looking at about six months ago, before all of the regional and language editors were in place. What would make for a fascinating and dynamic visualization of our coverage would be a script akin to the Global Attention Profiles project, that uses our country-specific rss feeds to measure daily activity.
Once that data is up, it would make for a fascinating comparison to see how Guatemala, for example, is represented in the mainstream media, technorati, blogpulse, and Global Voices. In fact, a trends graph on each country archive page would be pretty sweet too.
I’m pretty sure every editor and every volunteer draws content from their own personal OPMLs, which are all overlapping, but slightly different. I know I’ve covered DRC and West Africa blogs not reflected on the map.
And by the way, Ghana hands down!
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