Discover Magazine, Political Discourse

[Update: the article is online now. If you are arriving here via there, the Mapping the Blogosphere gallery may be of interest.]

Discover Magazine has a regular feature which takes a scientific visualization and provides a summary of interesting features. The May issue of Discover features an image that I generated by graphing the reciprocal links in the blogosphere. The online version of the mag doesn't yet have this article, but it has been interesting to read the few blog posts that referred to it.

Perhaps the most interesting post to date has been this one on DailyKos. Recently, Micah Sifry impressed on me the interest that visualizations of the blogosphere would have within the political community (a fact that the Kos post and this one at Direct Democracy underscores). Studying the differences in the structures of the blogosphere has suggested that bloggers in the political arena have denser linking behaviours. Connectivity is fundamental to politics however you look at it (something which is not necessarily true of technology punditry, though is of course true of the off line technology world of deals and research). What I mean by this is that politics is a function of discourse - consequently, it is not surprising to see a natural interest in understanding the nature of discourse.

[For the record, I am stretching a point here - scientific/technological research is often fueled by discussion.]

Comments

[Pilar Tiang]

I found this information to be eye-opening:
http://dave-lucas.blogspot.com/2007/04/what-map-welcome-to-blogosphere-doesnt.html

[Dingle Nero]

These candidates need to do one of the following:
1. Put the money in an escrow account
2. Send the money to either the California or Manhattan District Attorney's office, or the Department of Justice, to be put in escrow.

Doing anything other than this makes them complicit in a money laundering scheme. Giving the money to charity does not absolve them of guilt.