Astronomy Blog

Astronomy Tagged

For a while I've been running an experiment. I have a list of 229 astronomy and space related blogs and I created a robot which monitors their posts and extracts tags that the authors have attached. These tags let individual blogs groups their own posts but I wanted to see if there was anything useful that could be found from aggregating tags over a wide group. The result was Spacebuzz which lists the top tags of the moment and will plot the usage history for individual tags. Recently I created a page which shows an aggregate plot of all posts and tags over time.

The plot shows that the average number of tags per blog post is about 3 although some people use far more than that. You can also see the quiet times for tags (blue line) is between Christmas and New Year each year. It may be that heavy taggers have a break then because the overall number of blog posts doesn't drop as sharply. There is a hint of a very slow decline in the number of posts (green line). Interestingly, the recent end of the Shuttle programme led to a massive surge in tags but not much of an increase in blog posts.