Graphic, multimedia, and blog content presence in the Spanish academic web-space

Abstract

The number of pages in a website is an indicator (related to its activity) widely used in cybermetric analysis. This indicator can be disaggregated by type of content and file type. In this sense, a gap in the literature about the treatment and quantitative analysis of multimedia files, graphics and type blog is detected, and particularly in their presence and distribution in the academic environment. This paper proposes a diachronic analysis in 2010 of media and graphic files count, and blog-like content for all websites which conforms the Spanish university space. Among the key findings, a very high percentage of blog-like content and image files are detected, which contrasts with the very low figures obtained for multimedia files. Otherwise, diverse limitations in image searchers used are found (coverage, variations between samples, instability and discrepancies between the calculation of global and file format counts), which call for a careful interpretation of the raw results obtained. Finally, a correlation between Bing images and Google images higher than expected (limited by a small set of URLs), and a sharp decrease on Bing coverage during the study period is obtained.