Tribes of the Blogosphere

Everyone is familiar with the A-list perspective of the blogosphere: there are a handful of key individuals who wield much of the influence in terms of discussion, opinion, links and traffic. But what about the rest of us? How do we fit in? By taking the graph of the blogosphere and looking for groups of blogs which have strong links between them, we can shake out some of the communities that are either embedded in the core (the home of the A-listers) or which are loosely joined to, or completely separate from this central  über-community.

Let's start with a classic: the knitting community. For some reason, this is held out almost as an iconic example of the blogosphere's niche appeal. Key blogs include The Blue Blog, Wendy Knits! and The Yarn Harlot.

Next (right) we have very strong Portuguese community centered on Blasfemias and Foguetabraze. It is interesting to note that Blogspot plays an important role in this community (the red nodes). In contrast to the first example, this appears to be a community with a linguistic theme rather than a topical one.

Another example of a topical community is the librarians community (left). The most central blog here is The Shifted Librarian with Information Wants to be Free and Library Garden rounding out the field.

While topics and languages are obvious commonalities which relate people in the blogosphere, one also sees combinations of these helping to form communities. Canalblog is a French language platform currently with 170, 649 bloggers. The community to the right is an example of a pure Canalblog group.

The examples that I have shared here I selected almost entirely on aesthetic grounds. The distribution of these communities follows something like a power law (there being many more smaller communities than larger ones). The data used is a combination of the Workshop on Weblogging Ecosystems 2006 data and a couple of more recent sets.

Have a look at the gallery or the graphs tag for more posts on this topic.

Comments

[Eoin Purcell]

Nice post.
Quick note two of the library links are the same link!
Eoin
offeding links:
Information Wants to be Free and Library Garden are both
Information Wants to be free

[Matthew Hurst]

Eoin - thanks; fixed.

[Caleb "Maddog" Lovelace]

I found this place via Featured Blog and what a find! Awesome blog man, I love seeing the blogosphere, advertising and marketing tracked in this graphical fashion. It's great information. I'll be blogging about your blog and reading from now on! Kudos.

[Bruno Ribeiro]

Wonderful analysis!
Concerning the portuguese blog Blasfémias most likely the community that revolves around it is focused on socio-political topics; however the portuguese blogosphere is a bit "linkaholic" in a sense that almost every blog has a huge blogroll list.

I recently conducted an analysis of popularity (i.e. measuring average visits, inbound links and linking blogs from multiple sources) for the portuguese blogosphere and Blasfemias came out on top as it is one of the most dynamics and influential portuguese blog.

[Matthew Hurst]

Bruno, it looks like your blog is very interesting. If only I spoke Portuguese. I'll have to see if any of the online translation services can help. BTW, do you have the list of URLs from your paper on top Protuguese blogs? I'd be interested in having a look.

[Bruno Ribeiro]

Matthew,

I was checking out the Portuguese blog Foguetabraze 'cause I never heard of it before. The community built around it has a more significant theme than language: they're mostly blogs from Azores! Either the main topic of the blogs is Azores itself, or is a more general blog maintened by an azorian native. So actually, what we have here is a (micro)regional community inside another community based on region (Portugal). Mind you, it's not a unique case in the portuguese blogosphere.

Cheers

[Matthew Hurst]

Bruno,

That is interesting stuff. Something that I plan to do pretty soon is to take one of these communities and locate the bloggers geographically. It should be interesting to compare communities that are localised versus those which are global.

[Matthew Hurst]

Hi Mattew:
Nice work.
Only a curiosity: How/why do you choose/find Blasfémias?

[Gabriel Silva]

Sorry, last comment it's mine

[Matthew Hurst]

Gabriel,

Blasfémias essentially chose itself. I simply did an analysis which produced regions of the blogosphere which were strongly connected and this community appeared.