Bloglines users are a load of knitters

I love this. Bloglines users are a load of knitters:

It wouldn’t be too hard to write a scraper that took all of the publicly available subscription and folder information from bloglines, do some analysis on it and produce some reports on how people were categorising feeds on bloglines. This would fit in well with my other data liberation projects.

Four weeks later, after a few late nights I have got the first results from my analysis, and I have made a very important discovery.

Bloglines users appear to like knitting!

After producing a list of the top 100 folder names subscribed to on bloglines I found the usual suspects at the top “Blogs, news, tech, people, politics” etc. etc. But then at number 37, I found a folder called “Knitting” that had been used for 2,085 feeds.

Generally companies say that they release web services APIs in order to allow developers to build applications on top of their platforms — but a side effect of these releases has been to enable fascinating usage analyses of platforms with APIs. Instead of merely creating a web-enabled “Windows API,” web services are becoming a distributed, much finer-grained Nielsen.