Linking the Blogosphere
Discover Magazine has a great visual representation of the blogosphere, and of the connections between all of us:
Each dot is a blog, tied by innumerable threads to others around it. The numbers represent a sampling of some of the communites forming around certain blogs/memes- for example, #1 is DailyKos,with a big cloud of outgoing and incoming links.
This map reminds me of this equally beautiful map of the Internet (no not this one ): a bunch of major, central nodes, with streams of data flowing to other smaller nodes and so on. The map gives us a starkly visual reminder of how reliant we all are on each other- the vast majority of all blog posts contain links to…. other blogs, of course, and many a post is dedicated to commentary on what another blogger has to say.
Links are the lifeblood of the blogosphere. They’re quite peculiar, really. Links can be used as currency and are worth real money. Links are a measure of authority and respect. A link can be given out of friendship, respect, or deference to authority. At the same time, links are free, easy to create, and limitless. In that sense, links are more like hugs than cash. A link, like a hug from a stranger, makes you feel happy because it tells you that somewhere out there, someone likes you.
So, with that in mind, I’m going to be starting something new here at Neomeme. At the bottom of every post, there will be a section titled “Other thoughts”. There I will link to some good posts touching on the same issues from all around the blogsophere. Not just from the A-list from my feeds, but from wherever I follow the web of links that binds us together. If you’re a blogger, I urge you to do the same. Aside from providing a diversity of opinion, it spreads a little link love. And what goes around comes around.
Here’s a tiny example for this post- future posts that address topics more widely debated in the blogosphere will have many more diverse posts.
Other thoughts:
narahttbbs and others on LiveJournal ponder what isolates certain subcommunities from others- UNCoRRELATED delves deeper into the various blog communities, hates on LiveJournal out of ignorance and notices the impact of link blogs
- Alexander van Dijk notes the similarities between cyberspace and outer space.. and zakueins notes that the map of the Internet resembles a star cluster
Related Posts:
Links Coming and Going
Twitter is like, totally Web 0.5,lol
The Face That Launched a Thousand Blog Posts
The blog is dead. Long live the blog!
Tech Train: Tracking a Meme Through Space and Time
and how did he come up with something as complex as this? Is it a generator of some sort?
Great idea, Ilya.
Ed: The data comes from Technorati and Google blog search searches, particularly those linking to the same pages I link to. Technorati and Google index pretty much everything and rank by date posted, so there is no bias towards more popular blogs.
It’s certainly possible(and easy) to write some very simple code that does this by pulling search data from Technorati, but that would defeat the purpose, because they could go to link blogs, one sentence posts, etc. The point of this is to highlight intelligent contributions to the discourse that might otherwise go unnoticed- so all links will be selected lovingly by hand.
Great idea! Will start doing it now.
First time on your blog, keep up the good work
Thanks for coming by, Vivek! I look forward to reading your blog too
[…] couple of days ago, Neomeme posted a link to a Discover magazine article about the mapping of the blogosphere. Matthew Hurst of […]
Wow, no bias. That sounds good at least. It’s amazing how something simple like this could do something so spectacular and yet so pretty.
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Cool.