Feeds That Matter: A Study of Bloglines Subscriptions

Abstract

David Sifry's latest quarterly report on the state of the Blogosphere states that ``the size of the Blogosphere continues to double every six months". According to this report there are 33.5 million weblogs and many of these are actively posting. As the Blogosphere continues to grow, finding good quality feeds is becoming increasingly difficult. In this paper we present an analysis of the feeds subscribed by a set of publicly listed Bloglines users. Using the subscription information, we describe techniques to induce an intuitive set of topics for feeds and blogs. These topic categories, and their associated feeds, are key to a number of blog-related applications, including the compilation of a list of feeds that matter for a given topic. The site FTM! (Feeds That Matter) was implemented to help users browse and subscribe to an automatically generated catalog of popular feeds for different topics.