Mapping The Influence of News on The Blogosphere

Inspired by a number of comments from The Hyperlinked Society Conference, I'm posting some preliminary results of including mainstream media nodes in a map of the blogosphere. The full image can be found here. These results are very preliminary and are aimed at simply getting a feel for what is going on.

In the graph, as in earlier work, the circular nodes represent blogs and the edges represent citations between blogs. The square orange nodes represent press nodes (the data is that published for WWE 2006 which contains classification of citation links including 'Press' - thanks to Natalie Glance).

The cluster at the centre of the image is the familiar core of the blogosphere. The links emanating from the core show clearly the importance of MSM to those and other blogs. The large blue cluster on the left of the core represents LiveJournal. A possible result of this analysis could be that MSM is less important to LiveJournal blogs than to others (though we don't need a graph to discover that).

It is interesting to see the smaller groups of non-core blogs that cluster around MSM sites.

Until a more analysis is carried out on this there isn't much point in making any claims - I just wanted to get this out there. Note that Yahoo! News is noticeably absent suggesting some issues with the process I am using, though it could be explained simply by the thresholding I am using to only include links which have a strength of 10 or more (i.e. a link is only present if a citation has been made at least 10 times from blog A to blog B, or blog A to MSM site B).

Comments

[Netpo]

thanks for those reports from the conference and this interesting graph. One thing I'm very interested in these days is the increasing "porosity" between MSM and CGM. On your graph, one can assume the news items published or aired by the IHT, CNN, BBC and so on are then picked up and discussed by the "nodes" and blogs who link back to the original news item.
Now, as MSM enter into new areas, with syndication agreements with CGM portals (for instance, the IHT with ohmynews.com, AP with Technorati, Reuters with Globalvoices.org, etc.), I wonder if we'll see those links going the other way, with MSM picking up and linking back to the original blog article. I guess it goes back to your point about "directionality". Which way does information flow...

[Bitminer]

Am I missing something? As I look at the graphic I do not see anything in the center of the picture. There is a node in the upper left and lower left and then to the right. I am color blind so maybe the colors elude me?

[Matthew Hurst]

Netpo - you need to click the link to the full graphic. That showed inline in the post is just a crop of the complete picture.

[Antony Mayfield]

Thanks for the re-cap - really useful for reference.