I get these minor attacks of stats and celebrity watching.  I thought I’d try to do something interesting with it by comparing blog search results for a combination of mass media or household names with a collection of bloggers or social media folks to see how things compare.

The following is an unscientific sampling of Google Blog Search results, tracking the results of searches on people’s names.  I searched for the number of occurances of each name during the past 30 days, as taken today around 11 AM EST.  The list is sorted in descending order based on number of hits (or results) during the past month.

What exactly will we find in this?  Have a look first, my thoughts are below:

My thoughts:

1. Of course all of these numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt. These results come from blog entries, but they also come from comments made to blog entries.  Is that a big difference?  Probably not, but it’s worth considering.
2. SPAM:  some of these names are probably being used to sell stuff, either for the person being mentioned or for someone else who’s capitalizing on their good fortune.  Heck, some of these people have likely generated some of these results by their own activity.  My hypothesis is that the more famous you are, the higher the percentage of blog posts that reference you are really SPAM.
3. It sure looks like the folks with more mass media exposure get relatively more mentions in the blogosphere, regardless of whether or not they are active participants.
4. This study ignores Twitter/microblogging activity, message boards, and theoretically anything not considered a blog.
5. This is more of a curiosity than something useful, but it might provide more interesting information over time.
6. There are probably lots of other interesting people that we could survey.

I’m sort of interested in doing this type of survey periodically, but I think I could use more.  I have 65 names here so far, it would be a little more interesting to have 100.

Can you think of other interesting names, maybe 35 more in total, that we could use to expand this up to 100 names?

Who do you think would make interesting people (mass-media or digital media) to track?