Interesting visualization of the blogosphere over a 6 week period:
The blogosphere is the most explosive social network you’ll never see. Recent studies suggest that nearly 60 million blogs exist online, and about 175,000 more crop up daily (that’s about 2 every second). Even though the vast majority of blogs are either abandoned or isolated, many bloggers like to link to other Web sites. These links allow analysts to track trends in blogs and identify the most popular topics of data exchange. Social media expert Matthew Hurst recently collected link data for six weeks and produced this plot of the most active and interconnected parts of the blogosphere.
Source: Map: Welcome to the Blogosphere | Technology | DISCOVER Magazine
Relevant Blog Post:
Discover Magazine, Political Discourse
Discover Magazine has a regular feature which takes a scientific visualization and provides a summary of interesting features. The May issue of Discover features an image that I generated by graphing the reciprocal links in the blogosphere. The online version of the mag doesn't yet have this article, but it has been interesting to read the few blog posts that referred to it.
Perhaps the most interesting post to date has been this one on DailyKos. Recently, Micah Sifry impressed on me the interest that visualizations of the blogosphere would have within the political community (a fact that the Kos post and this one at Direct Democracy underscores). Studying the differences in the structures of the blogosphere has suggested that bloggers in the political arena have denser linking behaviours. Connectivity is fundamental to politics however you look at it (something which is not necessarily true of technology punditry, though is of course true of the off line technology world of deals and research). What I mean by this is that politics is a function of discourse - consequently, it is not surprising to see a natural interest in understanding the nature of discourse.
[For the record, I am stretching a point here - scientific/technological research is often fueled by discussion.]
Source: Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media
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