Talked about now on Discovery Magazine’s teeny piece about mapping a huge space — our very own Blogistan. It’s just beautiful — check the original source Mapping the Blogosphere page (datamining.typepad.com) for a bit more info, and their post about the Discovery piece for comments and conversation. Found at JWZ, who said “Green links are one way; blue links are reciprocal. LJ is over the eastern horizon, DailyKos is in the middle, Boing Boing is northeast, and porn is in Japan.” Depressing to see Michelle Malkin so prominent… which makes me wonder how they accounted for splogs (spam blogs) in all of this, an ever-annoying problem for all of us whose original content keeps getting snarfed… Snip:
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 expert Matthew Hurst recently collected link data for six weeks and produced this plot of the most active and interconnected parts of the blogosphere.
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).
Link.