I often ask myself the following question:

Which blogs should one read to be most up to date, i.e., to quickly know about important stories that propagate over the blogosphere?

My daily blog list is based on my interests, blog ranking sites, search engines and personal recommendations, and I'm pretty pleased with it. But sometimes, stories just get by, undetected by the radar. But now there is a new (and better) way to know which blogs to watch for.

A team of researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University spent an entire year analyzing data and developing a new algorithm for ranking blogs, based on a previous study for detecting disease outbreaks in water distribution networks (!). The study was done with data scraped from 45,000 blogs and 10 million posts over one year (2006). They used the 1 million links between those posts to see how information spread - following the chains of links in time back to the first post. And they have published their findings.

For example, reading the thirty top blogs picked their way captures around half the information in the blogosphere. The thirty top blogs ranked by the number of links they receive from other blogs - the basis of the popular technorati ranking - captures just 35 per cent.

And guess what, Planeta Asterico (there is a 50% chance you are reading this post through the Planeta's blog aggregator) is on place 43 of the list! So, point your browser to the website, choose you "budget" and start reading.