"The Blog Twinning Project

October 30, 2002 7:39 AM

"The Blog Twinning Project asks people to tell it which blogs they consider to be similar, and tallies results. Pairs of blogs with lots of mutual votes are declared 'twinned'."
Not a bad way to discover new reading material.
posted by Scottk (5 comments total)

Discussed here as well, but quite a while ago. I kinda like the structure of blogtree better.
posted by machaus at 7:49 AM on October 30, 2002

Surely the best use for it would be to show you which blogs are the most similar so you can cut down on wasting your time reading both?
posted by ralawrence at 8:04 AM on October 30, 2002

Maybe someone with a programming background could place these paired blogs into a virtual environment and have them breed?

Their offspring could compete with each other for resources (website visits=food, data transfer load=energy expenditure) and evolve, classic Darwinian fashion, into leaner, meaner, fitter, superior blogs (like Metafilter, of course).

But is this incestuous? Yes and no. The blogs might share a close genetic relation to each other, but (as per recent post on sibling incest) they have been "raised" apart and so they would tend to feel strong sexual attraction for each other. And the innbreeding would (as with animals - farm animals, domestic pets) tend to magnify those traits of theirs which are most distinctive.
posted by troutfishing at 8:48 AM on October 30, 2002

long time ago i became a fan of the presurfer. coupla years ago after a i had a heart attack gerard was one of two bloggers who emailed thier concern. (at the time i probably had a total readership consisting of those two people) somewhere along the line, we both got entered into the twinning thing, and before long we had been twinned. a while back, gerard had a hosting problem and almost gave up the blog, so the topper is, not only are we blogtwins, but our sites now reside on the same physical server. i think it's a grin!
posted by quonsar at 3:10 PM on October 30, 2002

In this context blogstreet should be mentioned as well. A kind of neighbourhood analysis of blogs. It looks at the link structures between blogs. You get a ranking of the blogs closest to your own depending on how many other blogs you link to link to the blogs in the ranking. Not sure if I explained that well. Go and figure out yourself.
posted by alex63 at 12:54 AM on October 31, 2002