“Statistically Improbable Links” or “Who has got the attention of bloggers?”

Most of our clients are interested in understanding what has the attention of bloggers who blog about a particular issue.

One way of looking at this is to analyse where bloggers, who blog about a particular issue, link to; and then identify the most popular destinations.

One problem with that approach is that lots of bloggers link to the same places; no mater the topic.

Link destinations popular with bloggers as a whole include FeedBurner, Blooger.com, WordPress, Technorati, etc, etc – as well as general stuff making news and waves.

One way we approach this problem is consistently providing valuable results to our clients. We call it “Statistically Improbable Links” or SILs.

SILs work in the following ways: By identifying where bloggers, who blog about a particular issue, link to – and use the rest of the blogsphere as a base line – you arrive at a list of links who are exclusively popular with bloggers who blog about the issue in focus.

Let me give a few examples:

Topic blogged about: Vodafone
Blog filtering: English language only
Geography: Worldwide
Period: Feb-Mar 2006

The 2 top links are links to Technorati (the tag link for Vodafone) and Vodafone’s corporate website, followed by

RIM's 3G Blackberry launch imminent
Astraware (a site that produces games for mobile phones and PDAs)
Open Letter to Vodafone (a disgruntled customer voicing his grievances)

By keeping an eye on the SILs of a topic one can effectively keep an eye on what has the attention of the bloggers who blog about this topic as well as the stories gaining traction with the group.

Occasionally the top SILs can be bring out a smile.

The top (tied with a few others) SIL for the period Feb-Mar/06 for blog posts containing the name of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is this article.