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Mapping the Blogosphere 76

Posted by CowboyNeal from the down-the-road-from-myspace dept.
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."
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Mapping the Blogosphere More

Mapping the Blogosphere

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  • Slashdot? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by charlieo88 ( 658362 ) on Saturday April 21, 2007 @12:22PM (#18824445)
    And where is Slashdot on the map, hmmmm?

  • Blogosphere mapped finally? (Score:5, Funny)

    by rts008 ( 812749 ) on Saturday April 21, 2007 @12:27PM (#18824489) Journal
    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...
    • 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.
  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by GrumpySimon ( 707671 )
      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 @01:56PM (#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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sfjoe ( 470510 )
      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".

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mdwh2 ( 535323 )
      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.
  • is there really such a thing as blogosphere? is it even a valid idea? why not call it the "webosphere"? heck, why not the "web" ? DUH!?? i have other words.. buzzword industry that feeds "crappy journalism".

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