The blogosphere is the most explosive social network you’ll never see. Recent studies suggest that nearly 60 million blogs exist online, and about 175,000 more crop up daily (that’s about 2 every second). Even though the vast majority of blogs are either abandoned or isolated, many bloggers like to link to other Web sites. These links allow analysts to track trends in blogs and identify the most popular topics of data exchange. Social media expertMatthew Hurst recently collected link data for six weeks and produced this plot of the most active and interconnected parts of the blogosphere.
Blogosphere as social network (Click Image to Enlarge)
Courtesy of Matthew Hurst
1 MR. POPULARITY
On the map, white dots represent individual blogs, sized according to number of links. Nearly 500,000 people visit the DailyKos every day, making it one of the world’s most popular blogs. A link from DailyKos is a guaranteed way of attracting Web traffic (and therefore advertising revenue), and as a result DailyKos has a strict link policy. Green links represent one-way links (that is, blog A links to blog B), and blue links indicate reciprocal links (blog B returns the favor).
2 THE GOSSIP OF GADGET HOUNDS
The bright spot here represents the popular siteBoingboing, a “Directory of Wonderful Things” that links to oddly compelling online news from the fringes of the real world but mostly offers gossip about gadgets and all things high-tech.
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