Linkology

The Virtual Handshake points to this article in New York magazine about blogs and their relationships. It describes the top 50 bloggers and illustrates their relationships with a one dimensional graph:

It is interesting to see the outages here, which represent blogs in this particularly top 50 list which neither link to others in the top 50, or have links from others in the top 50 (if I'm reading the description correctly). In terms of ink/info ratios, this representation rewards blogs which link to each other but which are far apart with more ink - not clearly a solid data visualization approach. I wonder what a circular layout would look like - certainly, a true graph is probably not suitable for the publication which is why, I'm guessing, this approach was taken. We're all programmed to grok ranked lists now ;-)