A Robot for analyzing the Persian Blogosphere
By Kamangir • Dec 31st, 2007 • Category: Iran, KiBeKi, media
Starting last month, I have been working on a project which I have titled “KiBeKi“, or “What’s up?” in English. The project aims at developing a software robot which would crawl inside the Persian blogosphere in order to generate the connectivity graph of this dynamic place as well as to extract other information.
At this moment, the robot has found 47317 sources, 3408 of which have been completely analyzed and 30866 of which have been determined to be Persian blogs but still await full analysis. During this process, the robot has discovered 2945 email addresses which are used by Persian bloggers. The robot is working right now and is gathering more information by the minute.
It is worth to mention that the robot does not have language recognition skills yet, and thus is only able to spot Persian blogs based on the server they are located on, plus the clues I manually give to it. Therefore, although there are many Persian blogs on blogspot and wordpress, these tentative results mainly include blogs found on Persian-language servers such as blogfa and persianblog.
This graph shows the email services used by Persian bloggers, as found so far by the robot. Clearly, for the group analyzed here, yahoo email is the most favorite service by far. gmail and hotmail follow with gmail being about six times more popular.
This graph shows the servers on which the spotted Persian blogs are located. The graph is titled as showing the “scripts” because there are many on-domain blogs which use wordpress, movable type or even blogger. Clearly, for the blogs analyzed here, blogfa.com is the most favorite service.
I am ready to share this information with any serious researcher in order to carry out a joint research project which would hopefully result in the publication of the generated results and analysis. If you have any interest in the subject, or know of any similar research going on anywhere, please leave a comment or send me an email to kamangirblog@yahoo.ca.
Posted by Kamangir
Author's email address: arash@kamangir.net | All posts by Kamangir
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Best wishes to you and yours for a happy 2008, Kamangir jaan!
Noga
Kamangir: To you too Noga Jan. :)
There is no danger that the robot can be used by the Iranian regime to identify and oppress bloggers, is there?
Happy new year
Ruth
Kamangir: If not used properly, this tool can be very dangerous and I am aware of that. Thanks for the reminder.
Briliant,
how do you read blogrolling links by the way?
Kamangir: It actually doesn’t, yet. I’ll write up the details of the operation very soon.
Happy new year, Kaman. :-)
Kamangir: Happy new year, Roman. :-)