Analysis of ISMB coverage at FriendFeed: 2008 – 2011

However, as I said, all was not lost. Before leaving, I backed up the ISMB 2008 feed (and a few other key feeds) to a MongoDB database. So a complete archive still exists on the Web; see the next section for the details.

Most posts are the titles of a talk, on which participants can then comment. From 2009 onwards, the ISMB committee posted each title just before the presentation took place; prior to that, titles were posted by the bloggers themselves. We can see the increase in talks at the joint ISMB/ECCB meetings in 2009 and 2011.

Most comments were posted at the 2009 meeting. This was due to two factors: promotion of the FriendFeed site by ISMB, based on the success of the 2008 experiment and the attendance of several enthusiastic, prolific participants in 2009. Yes you, Allyson “the robo-blogger” Lister and Ruchira Datta. Since then, total comments have fallen to below those in 2008.

The comment/post ratio is a crude measure of how much discussion is generated by posts. It was relatively high in 2008, peaked in 2009 and since then, has declined. One reason for this is that whilst all talks are posted by ISMB, many are not attended by the bloggers involved.

110 unique individuals have posted 6 906 comments at ISMB between 2008 and 2011.

The proportion of posts with comments has declined steadily, from around 90% in 2008 to about 26% in 2011. That can be explained in part by the observation that in 2008, posts were initiated by the bloggers themselves. This means that at least one blogger was in the room waiting for the talk to begin and therefore, comments on a post were more likely.

In later years, where all talks are posted by default, there are in effect “fewer bloggers to go around.”

The median number of comments on a post has fallen from 6.5 in 2008, to 5 in 2009, to zero in 2010 and 2011. This simply means that at least half of the posts did not receive a comment, for the reasons described in the previous section.

The interesting observation here is that more participants leads to fewer comments per person. Total participants:median comments per person for each year are as follows: 2008 33:5, 2009 63:4.5, 2010 33:2, 2011 18:11. This suggests two scenarios: either a “long tail”, where many people post a few comments and a few people post many comments, or a smaller, core group with a more even spread of activity.

However, 2011 is clearly different to other years with far fewer participants and 3 distinct groups of low, medium and high activity.

Typically, ISMB consists of satellite meetings for the first 2 days, followed by the main event on days 3-5. If you squint, you can discern peaks of activity corresponding to the morning and afternoon keynote presentations. The overall higher activity in 2009 is apparent. You can also see that in 2011, coverage of the earlier SIG meetings started strongly, but stalled on day 2. I believe, as is often the case, that this was due to wi-fi issues, which also plagued the 2010 meeting.

Times on FriendFeed are recorded in GMT. This allows us to distinguish the North American meetings (2008, 2010) where talks appear to take place in the evening from those in Europe (2009, 2011), where the times are more as you might expect. A nice modification to the code would be conversion of dates/times to the local timezone for the meeting.

Keynotes are always popular of course, but it’s good to see some of the other sessions make the top 10 list. In particular, a SIG presentation on SNPs ranks second, highlighting the interest in this topic. Of course, there are popular talks that lie just outside the top 10 and a few talks, such as Janet Thornton’s 2011 keynote, which rank highly in terms of “likes” but have fewer comments. Presumably, the audience are too engrossed to be distracted by blogging.