Mapping The Blogosphere: LiveJournal
Here is an initial view of the LiveJournal portion of the blogosphere. The image maps 24, 000 LiveJournal blogs using the interlinking, or citations between blogs to determine the layout. This means that blogs near the periphery have fewer links. I've also included press sites in the graph. These are the square nodes painted in pale yellow.
Qualitative notes:
- There appears to be a central mass and a second attendant mass on the right hand side: my current hypothesis is that this is the Russian LiveJournal group (I cleverly anonymized the blogs and can't inspect them at this moment).
- Press sites are central (the closer to the centre of the map, the more universal the appeal of a site). However, there are other press sites which are found outside the central area.
Note that I created this partly in response to criticism that other maps shown on this site were very top down. In order to create this image I had to lower the threshold for what counted as a citation between blogs (in other words, whereas I had required there to be 2 links from A to B to count as evidence for a relationship I now only require 1).
Is the diameter of each circle relative to the importance of each blog?
Posted by: SN | June 24, 2006 at 05:48 PM
SN - that is correct (for some definition of importance). I'm working on another LiveJournal visualization which I plan to put in the gallery soon.
Posted by: Matthew Hurst | June 27, 2006 at 01:57 PM
Great creative visualization.
Have a look at my Information Visualization blog for a sample of hyperlink mapping, as developed by Aharef and another by Guillaume du Gardier.
[http://akbani.blogspot.com/2006/06/visualizing-innernet-or-visual-display.html ]
Best, Mohamed
Posted by: Dr. Mohamed Taher | June 29, 2006 at 03:05 PM