Applying a user-centered metric to identify active blogs

Current methods of determining whether a blog is active or abandoned tend to rely on simple rules, such as identifying whether it has been posted to within the last 7 or 30 days. Individual bloggers vary widely in their posting activity levels, however, and so using such fixed cutoffs can result in both misses (calling active blogs "abandoned") and false positives (calling abandoned blogs "active"). We suggest using an alternative metric that varies the cutoff date according to the properties of each individual blog, and show how its results relate to those of the standard 30-day active metric. From our initial analysis, we believe that such a metric offers a more accurate representation of the intuitive notion of blog activity.