Traffic Characteristics and Communication Patterns

in BlogosphereBy Fernando Duarte, Bernardo Mattos, Azer Bestavros, Virgilio

Almeida, Jussara Almeida

Attacked by Ionut Trestian

Introduction – What are we looking at? (I)

Introduction – What are we looking at? (II)

• The paper will try to trick you with big numbers

• 200,000 distinct blogs out of an estimated of 60,000,000 world blogs in 2006.• That’s 0.33%

• Population of Brazil: approx 200,000,000

– That’s 3.33% out of 6,000,000,000

Motivation (I)

• At least the authors don’t give the usual motivation:

- “blogs important in politics, economy etc”

• This would actually be hard in fact of the figures we showed earlier

• Motivation is to study how blogs impact traffic

Motivation (II)

• Traffic engineering• Traffic engineering ???

• Last time I checked ISPs were more worried about clients doing streaming and costly downloads

• Or you want to kill the problem from its source?

Burstiness of access patterns ?

My point?

• The observed burstiness probably comes from external factors – events that trigger users discussion/information sharing

• But the paper never tries to correlate the observed behavior with these facts …

Search engines (I)

Search engines (II)

• Why change search engines by incorporating social information in Page-Rank?

• Search engines and Social Networks have 2 different functions:

– Search engines: finding content

– Social networks: finding what my friends are doing

• Imagine social networks as being bookmarks to your friends

Search engines (III)

• How do people who read get to these different types of blogs, isn’t that important?

– Broadcast probably list links to content

– Parlor is where the discussions take place

– Register ?

Search engines (IV)

• Also the authors never mention what attracted the search engine users to the blog in the first place

– Finding content – rapidshare links

– Getting tricked – spam

• Conclusion

– Terrible idea

– Most search engines ignore blogs anyway

– Makes sense to have both just the same way as most people use both bookmarks and search engines

Distributions (for Gregory)

Conclusions

• Motivation – almost non-existent

• Their Applications even more so …

– Generating blog traffic

– Modifying existing search engines