Kamangir (Archer) - کمانگیر

You might know that since a few months ago I have been working on a robot which crawls through the Persian blogosphere (see: Statistics of 78,000 Persian Blogs - Report on KiBeKi’s results so far). A companion to this robot is another project I have been working on recently. I have given the name “Didish?” to this project (means “have you seen it?” in Persian).

Didish is a feed aggregator (installed at didish.kamangir.net), which archives the links Persian bloggers share through delicious, Google Reader, or other services. As of now, I have been able to find 163 sources. This chart shows which service the sharing is carried out through.

Clearly, delicious is the favorite sharing service for Persian bloggers. This could be due to the fact that the sharing service in Google Reader is fairly new.

Using DidishExtractor, a custom tool I have developed in Delphi, I have been able to extract the recent links of the sources,therefore collecting a total of more than 20,000 links shared by Persian bloggers. These links are from over 4300 different sources (blogs and websites). I will skip the technical details here, but the tool goes through different stages of lookup table-based parsing and other string-related procedures.

The first question I aimed at giving an answer to was “which Persian sources are the ten most favorites, according to the links shared by Persian bloggers?” The answer to this question is given below, both as a pie chart and as a list. Interestingly, these 10 sources make up about 20% of the total, indicating that there are a few “hot” sources and a huge number of “less popular” ones, as one would also expect.

1. bbc.co.uk
2. radiozamaaneh.com
3. 1pezeshk.com
4. persian.kamangir.net
5. updateblog.net
6. dw-world.de
7. freekeyboard.net
8. nikahang.blogspot.com
9. bamdadi.com
10. asroone.net

As shown here, BBC Persian and the Amsterdam-based Radio Zamaneh are on top of the list, closely followed by two Persian blogs of 1pezeshk.com and persian.kamangir.net (my Persian blog). Then come the Persian blog updateblog.net and DW-World Persian. Interestingly, none of the state-run news sources make it to the top-ten list.

As the early results of KiBeKi suggested that the Persian blogging service blogfa is the dominant player in the Persian blogosphere, the main domain names of the aggregated links were analyzed in an independent analysis. Interestingly, the top-ten hottest domain names contain about half the total links.

Although, three fourths of the blogs KiBeKi discovers are hosted on blogfa, this analysis shows that Persian bloggers prefer links on blogspot and wordpress more. Note that these blogs may be in other languages other than Persian. Finally, we observe that four Persian blogs of 1pezeshk.com, persian.kamangir.net, updateblog.net and freekeyboard.net are able to compete with the whole blogfa, in terms of number of posts shared by other Persian bloggers.

These are very preliminary results and more analysis has to be carried out in order to verify them. If you have any interest in this field or would like to do joint research, please drop me a line here or send me an email at kamangirblog@yahoo.ca. This post is also available in Persian.