Mapping Global Voices Online
Ethan Zuckerman is involved in a great project, worthy of everyone's attention: Global Voices Online. After recently catching up with Ethan, I'm trying to catch up with this project. I'm not yet sure of all the blog content that is aggregated on the site, but I did find a link to this BlogLines subscription for blogs aggregated by the project.
By parsing the OPML I extracted simple counts of the number of blogs from each country - I then plotted a map showing where the blogs are and how many.
Red indicates countries with < 5 bloggers; blue < 50; green < 250; and pink < 500. There were a few blogs that didn't make it through as they were associated with regions (or categories like General). In addition there were one or two countries that didn't match with the geographic database I am using. The subscription data also contained a few typographic errors.
Note that I hate this projection as much as the next person - I'm still in the middle of refactoring the code that produces these things.
This is cool :) Do you plan to make the code available online? I would like to get a map for the PR Blogs List - http://www.bloglines.com/public/prblogs (I can make a separate OPML file for blogs distribution by countries only; and I'll have to modify the threshold - we only have about 500 feeds right now). Thank you!
Posted by: Constantin Basturea | June 12, 2006 at 01:03 PM