Weblog Activation Simulation

This post is partly to show the animation that I presented at PDF2008 and partly to test Vimeo (thanks to Jeff Jarvis and Jake for the recommendation).

This graph animation illustrates the reach over time of a blog post. When a blog is activated (when a node is selected by the pointer) other blogs that link to it have some chance of referring to the injected post. The animation is intended to give an impression of how information might spread in the blogosphere.

Firstly, I activate a few peripheral blogs – these don’t have many connections and so we don’t see much spread. Then a small community in the south west corner is activated – information spreads within the community but doesn’t break out. Finally I look at a few blogs in the central core. Here we see information spreading through the core.

Note that the graphical data is real – this is a visualization of the core of the blogosphere circa 2007; the spread of information is only a (simulated) illustration. Note also that there are many other (better) ways to model diffusion – I’ll publish more animations as and when I start looking into this area!

Weblog Activation Simulation from matthew hurst on Vimeo.

The weblogs that I use in this example are:

• Living Catholisism
• RevGalBlogPals
• Who Tends The Fires (defunct)
• Her Bad Mother
• Gateway Pundit
• Engadget
• BuzzMachine

Comments

[vincos]

Impressing man ! Just for my better understanding...is the simulation of the spread based on true data, models of diffusion ? thank you