Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Mapping the Blogosphere

Posted by CowboyNeal on Sat Apr 21, 2007 11:12 AM
from the down-the-road-from-myspace dept.
The Internet IT
dominique_cimafranca writes "Discover Magazine has an interesting article on mapping the blogosphere, reporting on the work of Matthew Hurst. Hurst put together a 3D map of the blogosphere, with bright spots represent sites with the highest number of links and isolated islands represent closed communities like LiveJournal. The study also identifies other islands like sociopolitical commentary, gadget hounds, sports fans, and, um, porn blogs."
+ -
story
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Mapping the Blogosphere 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Slashdot? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by charlieo88 (658362) on Saturday April 21 2007, @11:22AM (#18824445)
    And where is Slashdot on the map, hmmmm?
  • Now that we have tactical info, we can nuke it from orbit...only way to be sure.
  • I'm going to try to pre-empt a whole bunch of comments here by saying that new technology and ways of thinking sometimes require new words. When that constitutes a buzzword, as opposed to a legitimate attempt to define something new, is sort of unclear [google.com]. However, I'm staking out the position that the inter-relation and rapid spread of topics seen in blogs requires legitimate new terminology. Although I'm well aware that some people here still regard blog as buzzword, even though it's been almost entirely mai

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by 1010110010 (1002553)
      "Blog" isn't a buzzword, it's just a really stupid word.
      • What extols affairs, bemoans and swears
        Polls Rover your neighbors dog?
        What's great for some flack a personal attack?
        It's Blog, Blog. Blog!

        It's Blog, Blog, its big, it's heavy, it could.
        It's Blog, Blog, it's better than bad, it's good!
        Everyone wants a Blog! You're gonna love it, Blog!
        Come and get your Blog! Everyone needs a Blog!

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      blog as buzzword


      Oh, I don't take issue with the term "blog" but I do take issue with the pseudo-intellectual idiots who throw the term "blogosphere" around until I'd like to seem the be the star of a tragic farming accident. Most of them are self-important denizens of the tardosphere anyway...

        • Re: (Score:1, Redundant)

          by alienmole (15522)
          Newsflash: the ENTIRE WORLD includes more than just the denizens of your dormroom. "Blogosphere" is hardly mainstream, except amongst blogonerds.
    • online shopping sites have been responsible for more new tech and ways of thinking than blogs. What buzzwords have they created? E-Commerce? Nobody talks about the E-Commerceosphere, because that would be retarded. It takes a special brand of self-important wankery to designate one's favored Type Of Website as being worthy of its own Sphere. Blog may be mainstreaming, but blogosphere is meaningless tot, and anyone concerned with language for its own sake should be concerned.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        While you're worrying about your MySpace profile, nerds will be busy inventing the Next Big Thing for you and your friends to fawn over. The "blogosphere" will last as long as it holds your attention..which is about 3 years, tops.
  • I can understand not providing the sphere as maybe a little java applet that would allow readers to zoom in and/or rotate the sphere to get a better perspective. That would require more than a little effort.

    But cartographers have been managing to project a two dimensional representation of a sphereical object for hundreds of years. Too bad they couldn't use some of that "map" technology to make the image more useful.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by T-Bone-T (1048702)
      It started out 3D, why not keep it 3D? I do understand your sentiment. The experience was somewhat...lacking.
    • But the blogospherewebtwopointoh cannot leverage existing technologies! That would be agsinst the principle of long-tailedness! What this needs is some AJAX map projection system preferably built in Ruby on Rails with some sweeeeet 2.0 domain name like map.aumatic.us.
    • Cartogrophers map the earth, which is the surface of an (almost) sphere. Imagine the earth as a sphere full of interconnected tunnels. Now try to figure out how to map that in 2D and you'll see why the project mentioned didn't do that.
      • That would be extremely difficult, but it does not appear that the links are represented by tunnels, just lines that follow the curvature of the sphere.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by charlieo88 (658362)
        You didn't read the article, did you?

        First, the map had no geographical component. Yep, could have been projected on a cube or a pyramid, wouldn't have made a difference. The sphere thing was just a gimmick. Now if he could only have projected it on something FLAT.

  • Bright spots (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    you mean that look like Acne and Boils on the face of the Internet ?

  • Remember the Internet Mapping Project?

    http://www.cheswick.com/ches/map/gallery/index.htm l/ [cheswick.com]

    Overlay (embed?) the Blogosphere map on an updated Internet map!

    Maybe a "You are here" icon?

  • There are other things that are worse. Straight from Dr Dobbs Journal I bring you this headline:
    "C++ STL Hash Containers and Performance" and if that is not good enough, the subtitle is: "Hash containers are powerful tools to add to your performance toolbox"

    Even though I think blogosphere is a suck-ass buzzword which should be named after its past incarnation, "speaker's corner" I have to admit that there are worse word usage in the tech world.

    Perhaps we might exchange blogosphere for "Internet whispers" in
  • I also noticed that the title was "welcome to the blogosphere", which reminded me of the Guns n Roses song "welcome to the jungle"

    "Welcome to the blogosphere we've got your disease..."

    I think we should have a contest to see what other G'n'R songs can be remade to be about the intertubes.
    • Nice association Glowing Fish. I am still trying to make sense of this article, and the implications of the bogosphere while my cat prances across my keyboard.

  • Livejournal is a dim island? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Risha (999721) on Saturday April 21 2007, @12:56PM (#18825181) Homepage
    I wonder where these numbers are coming from? I spend a lot of time on Livejournal, including some journals getting several hundred + hits a day as a matter of course. It's no 500,000 hits per day, but it's not as insignificant as that map shows. They're also linking out to unrelated blogs all the time, just like non-LJ blogs.
    • It's also importnt to remember that this doesn't show any sort of relation with rational thought. Number 4 shows one of the "brightest light belongs to syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin". For those of you not familiar, she's a right-wing radical who thinks that the imprisoning of Japanese-Americans during WWII was a really good idea and we need to do it more often.

      There's your "blogosphere".

        • I must gleefully crush your spirit. Slashdot is a community forum not a blog. So we shall never know...
    • Yeah I'm curious by that too - people on LiveJournal link to other blogs all the time, just as much as other blogs I've seen.

      Also you can set up feeds on LiveJournal which pick up blogs via their RSS feeds, which is probably a much more common way for people on LiveJournal to follow non-LJ blogs - I do hope that they weren't just going by old fashioned web links, that kind of misses the whole point of blogs and new technologies like RSS, and would make their image rather innaccurate.
    • The map traces incoming links to a site, instead of outgoing links. So I think it means that most links going into LJ sites are coming from LJ itself, instead of from outside that community. Hence, the island. Now I wish they had a map of outgoing links...
      • I bought an issue of Discover for reading during a flight, and that did confuse me. I guess it's just a methodology issue there. I know that LiveJournal isn't "the" thing anymore, but it is pretty nice. I like the community, the parts I am in is generally far less juvenile than pretty much anywhere else.
    • I wondered about that too. Keep in mind that it is a 2D image of "a 3D map of the blogosphere", presumably oriented for maximum clarity, so a minor-but-significant outlier like LiveJournal might have been swung out to one side so as not to eclipse the core image. If that's the case, we could be looking at the thin edge of a flat section, pressed up against the outside of the sphere to represent the low-link gulf. Even so, given the prevalence on LJ of syndicated feeds and such, I wouldn't be surprised if t
  • Bomb The Blogosphere! http://www.questionablecontent.net/ [questionablecontent.net]
  • Following the links reveals that the software is based on a paper by King and Lu (2007), How to Classify Deaths without Physicians, which shows how to get "estimates considerably better than the existing approaches which included expensive and unreliable physician reviews, where three physicians spend 20 minutes with the answers to the symptom questions from each deceased to decide on the cause of death."

    Question: This interview will only take a few minutes. Then you can go to your eternal rest. When did
  • getting lost in the brightest light in blob number four, Michelle Malkin. I had never heard of her before. It was a good laugh for a while, but mostly sickening. Does this mean tons of people are reading crap from the likes of her? If so that's really depressing.
    • Yes. It is second only to the henious contraction that is the word 'blog' itself.

    • Can we all agree that "blogosphere" is one of the worst buzzwords ever invented?
      It's one of those words that manages to sound both moronic and pretentious, like it was invented by a 12-year-old who wasn't half as clever as he liked to think he was.
      • it was invented by a 12-year-old who wasn't half as clever as he liked to think he was.

        'nuff said.

        Incredible the number of people that throw up blogs and go on as if they're journalists. Talk about undeserved senses of superiority.

        • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

          by PopeRatzo (965947) *
          I think the problem came when blogs began to be associated with "journalism". Everything went wrong when journalists started to think they're inane personal ramblings were worth sharing with the world, and ordinary people starting thinking that their lives were somehow worth reporting to others.

          It might not have gone that way, you know. Blogs could have stayed simple sites for sharing information about one's life with those who care and journalists could have presented their work on news and opinion sites

          • "A blog (short for web log) is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order." -- Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

            It is not a description of the content (think "wiki", "forum", "guestbook", etc...), so they can be used for a number of purposes. I myself have two web logs- one for communicating with my family and friends (since I live across an ocean from them), and another for a university class. I bet you could give two shits and a fuck about both of them, but

            • I bet you could give two shits and a fuck about both of them, but they serve their purposes very well.

              Correct.

      • The not-as-clever-as-he-liked-to-think inventor was older than 12, you insensitive clod!

      • Well, yeah. The right word would be "blogspace".

        That's not to say that bloggers aren't moronic and pretentious and full of their own self-importance, but they are "real", and form a "real" community, which should have a real word to describe it.
    • I thought blogosphere was invented ironically, and was thus a great faux-buzzword.

      I usually change it further, into "blogotubes" or "tubosphere", and then ask people devoutly pecking away at their laptops in coffeeshops whether they are "tubosphering"

      But that is just me.
    • I'm just tired of having every website I have or am involved in called a "blog". It's not a goddamned blog, it's a website. That word makes me want to live in a little shack in the woods and spend the rest of my life having nothing to do with technology.
      • Strongly agreeing here. Like, there's this radio show I listen to on the way to work where they always mention how you can 'blog' on their website, and how people are 'blogging'. No. Your site is not a blog. There's a goddamn forum you can post on. Not a blog. It's annoying.
      • Without sounding like an aplogist, for bloggists , it's one of those terms that is short for web log. The problem is that there is an increase in it's use as a marketing mechanism , so it's lost the web log element
    • It's pretty much showing that the US has the highest density of active blogs.

      175,000 blogs don't turn up a day though, 175,000 web pages that get called blogs that are thrown up by bots or people who don't much care to put any work into them are created. a 'Blog' is something that has actually been used as a log/place to express opinions over a period of time.

      Interesting isn't it, that one of the poster children of web 2.0 is producing just as much meaningless crap as that old boring angelfire/auto home pag

      • It's pretty much showing that the US has the highest density of active blogs.

        How is it showing that? The image in the article isn't based on geographical information.

        Not that I disagree about the amount of rubbish on blogs.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.