The blogosphere is familiar with the Reuters photoshop scandal in which a major news agency distributed images of the Israeli-Lebanon war which were doctored to create the impression that attacks by Israel were more photogenic than they actually were. Here's a graph of discussion on this topic. One line shows links to the Little Green Footballs' post unearthing and tracking the topic and the other the volume of conversation in general.
Of course, what this type of graph fails to show is the structure of conversation on the topic.
The next graph shows (a sample of) the tree structure of the conversation. Each dot represents a blog post and each line indicates a citation.
Initial posting on the 5th was followed by a peak on the 6th, just as in the first graph. However, what we can see in this graph is the later pick up on the 15th and 18th and the consequent secondary amplification. The first half of the graph represents what we might call the first epoch of diffusion. This is then followed by a second.
Now, what this graph doesn't show is how that happens. We can see that the citation structure is there, but what we can see the intention behind the post nor the actions of the blogger that led them to discover the post. This post is not going to dig through the data to summarize what is happening precisely in this case, but we can consider a few hypotheses:
- Late discovery and amplification in smaller community.
- Cross-over to another language/geographic location which is not generally concerned with the western media stream.
- Use of the story to support or illustrate a second story.
I find the last explanation particularly interesting as it suggests the narrative structure around a theme rather than a single story.
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