Mapping the Blogosphere

The image to the left is a portion of a new visualization of the blogosphere. The full image is located here. The visualization does two things. Firstly, it clusters blogs according to a measurement of connectivity designed to show communities. These communities are defined by a certain amount of cross linking.

Secondly, these communities are then laid out according to how much interlinking goes on between them. Interlinking between communities is measured by observing any links between blogs in each community. The gray lines between clusters represent these inter-community links.

Upon examining the clusters, one can observe clear thematic groupings. These may be topical: the largest cluster is the social/political cluster; others include gadgets, the tech/web 2.0 landscape, etc. On the other hand, there are cultural and locale clusters. For example, Japanese bloggers, South East Asian bloggers, etc. Finally, there are communities that are by and large constrained by hosting systems. The blue clusters are communities within livejournal.

Note that the colouring of blogs indicates the top level domain for that blog. All blogs, for example, from typepad have the same colour. Note that a limited colour palette is used, so all blogs with the same colour are not necessarily from the same domain.

The next step in this work is to label (either by hand or automatically) the clusters.

Update: To answer Dave's comment, the data used for this work came from our data collection released for the Workshop on Weblogging Ecosystems, to be held in Edinburgh in May of this year.

Comments

[Dave]

Any clues to where you sourced this from?

[Apostolos Kritikopoulos]

Can I ask you something? Which tool did you use to visualize the communities? And what was the form of the input data?

Best Regards,
Apostolos

[Matthew Hurst]

Apostolos,

I used a homebrew tool to visualize the communities, and the input data came from a collection of blog posts that we (BlogPulse/Intelliseek) have made available for the upcoming Workshop on Weblogging Ecosystems, to be held in conjunction with the WWW Conference in May (Edinburgh).

[mohsen shawarby]

interested in trying out this toolweb-traiing ? can I downloaded it?? where from?

[Mohsen Shawarby]

1) I am looking for tools to measure data posted on web-blogs in foreign languages.
2) what tools to monito certain blog for changes, posted videos, photos, etc.

Thanks,
MAS

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