In my work as a public relations consultant, I often monitor blogs for my clients. And sometimes, I am able to form a friendship with some of the bloggers that I monitor and interact with on a daily basis.
This is true of Rob LaGesse, who is a local blogger with whom I have come to respect. Through him, I have started to follow a 16-year-old blogger and coder Yuvi, who lives in Chennai, India.
Yuvi has come up with a way to do a thorough content analysis of blogs, and he has done so for Robert Scoble, among others. However, yesterday, Yuvi unveiled his most recent and ambitious project, which is a full content analysis of Engadget, the big Daddy of all blogs. He covered the dates of March 2, 2004, to May 16, 2007.
But don’t bother clicking Yuvi’s link because the site is down from the massive traffic this analysis has garnered; he exceeded his bandwidth. Instead you can look at his handiwork on a mirror site he hastily put up.
Yuvi’s work holds out great promise for those of us in public relations and marketing that need to follow not only when we are mentioned, but in what context. It also can give rich information to publishers.
For example, in the next two charts you can see that while Engadget puts up the most posts about cell phones and portable audio, the ones that receive the most comments (and obviously hold the most interest to readers) are those about features and gaming. It is interesting to note that the topic of features comes in dead last on what Engadget writes about. The analysis would suggest that Engadget should increase the number of stories about features and gaming, and slow down on the stories about cell phones – which comes in 4th from the last in comments.
Yuvi is in search of money to host his blog and do his analysis work, so he has offered to mine the Engadget data for interested parties – meaning, if Engadget is on your list of blogs to cover or watch, now is a good time to get some rich and specific information for a very attractive price. More details are on the mirror site. For instance, it would be interesting to know how many of the comments were positive vs. negative and so on.
And if you interested in how Yuvi was able to crunch the data for Engadget with limited resources, you can head over to Rob’s blog, where he explains how this all came about and how he lent Yuvi some space on his Rackspace account – a very cool enterprise level hosting company here in San Antonio.
Yuvi says he someday wants to work at Microsoft and is hoping to come to the United States for his college education. He has one more year of school left, but I am betting he will have more than one of his dreams come true. He already has one job offer, more than I could say when I was a senior in high school, unless you count my stint at McDonald’s of course.
