Fourth of July, Tour de France, Cometary Explosions, Rove on a stick, the Supremes ... all fun, all interesting, all happening right here right now. But the year at Daily Kos is half over. Let's look back and see what we've been up to.
Head on down to the (very) full diary for details, but here's the graphic summary of the community conversation.
The thumbnail image is linked to a larger picture which shows those Kosmopolitans who, in the first half of 2005, recommended each others diaries 10 or more times. Every circle with a name represents one Kosmopolitan author. Every line between two circles represents the fact that those two authors each recommended each others diaries 10 or more times. The color of the circles indicates the total impact of the diaries published by that user over the same time period. The range is 0 (greenish) to 90 (orange) bharns. The graph was laid out using the AT&T graphviz tools.
In the first half of the year 6258 Kosmopolitan authors posted 43952 diaries, of which 509 were later withdrawn, 38714 were recommended at least once by a cadre of 9347 recommending readers, 10194 diaries were recommended by 10 or more readers, 3073 by 30 or more.
Gulp. No wonder Gary Trudeau is making fun of us. We are so lazy!
Among the readers, there were 541 who recommended diaries of at least one diarist 10 or more times. Of these 541, 152 were also diarists. Among these 48 mutually recommended at least one other diarist. The network graph visualizes these relationships.
The first 2600 or fewer diaries with impact > 0.3 50 (you don't want to see all 2600, do you? Besides, at 2600 stories the impact had only dropped to around 0.45, and it broke the posting mechanism :-() are shown below, sorted by number of recommendations. The 100 authors with the highest total impact, and the 100 recommending readers who conferred the most recommendations are also tabulated.
Here are graphs showing diaries diaries per day, and diaries per hour, diary dwell time each hour, and fraction of diaries awarded 10 or more recommendations. The daily totals show a weekly rhythm, with increased posts early in the year followed by a more steady pace, with a spike to more than 400 diaries per day recently.
Because I'm often asked, I will note that these data show that there are some systematic differences in the rate of success throughout the day. Presumably, the same diary posted at the worst time (midnight) would have a 40% better chance if it had come out at the best time (6 AM). Whether or not these average values are of any practical significance is another question: just right write good stuff, ok?
A few more comments on the network graph: it's impossible to get
a perfect visualization of a large network, it's like trying to
take a snapshot of the Grand Canyon. You're going to leave something
out. I've tried a lot of different things, and I'm pretty happy
with this one. I'm hoping to show the core of the conversation here: authors
who are reading and recommending each other regularly. As always, setting the cutoff a little lower would include more people in the picture, and certainly there are a LOT more people who could and should be there. This is a first effort, and I wanted to be sure to have a picture that was comprehensible, not too busy. Whether I achieved that I'll let others tell me.
Sat Jan 1 00:00:00 2005 - Fri Jul 1 23:59:59 2005
DailyKos diaries = 43952; 241 per day; 10.1 per hour
Active Kosmopolitans: 11116
Exclusive Authors: 1769; Author/Readers: 4489; Total Authors: 6258
Exclusive Readers: 4858; Author/Readers: 4489; Total Readers: 9347
Diaries: posted 43952, withdrawn: 509, remaining: 43443, recommended {1: 38714, 10: 10194, 30: 3073}.
The analysis of authors includes total impact, number of diaries, and the average impact per diary.
Impact total: 2287.6
The analysis of readers includes the number of recommendations
awarded, the number of authors recommended, the number and percent
of their recommendations on the most recommended list (conversion),
and a ratio reflecting how much better the recommendations they
made matched the top hit list than would the same number of random
picks.
rec = number of diaries recommended
authors = number of authors recommended
TopHits = number of recommended diaries in top hit list
conversion = 100 * TopHits/rec; percent of recommended diaries on top hit list
ratio = TopHits/predicted, where
predicted = ntop * rec/ndiaries, where
ntop = number of diaries in top hit list = 2600
ndiaries = total number of diaries = 43443
NB: Rankings and numbers of diaries are based on a best effort to comprehensively collect and count all user diaries posted to dailykos.com, including those later withdrawn. Titles shown will not reflect changes made later in the week. Production of this list was timed to ensure expiration of the recommendation period for all diaries considered. Please bring any errors to my attention -- jotter