Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis "From the Bottom Up"
Herring, S.C.; Kouper, I.; Paolillo, J.C.; Scheidt, L.A.; Tyworth, M.; Welsch, P.; Wright, E.; Ning Yu
System Sciences, 2005. HICSS apos;05. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on
Volume , Issue , 03-06 Jan. 2005 Page(s): 107b - 107b
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/HICSS.2005.167
Summary: The "blogosphere" has been claimed to be a densely interconnected conversation, with bloggers linking to other bloggers, referring to them in their entries, and posting comments on each other's blogs. Most such characterizations have privileged a subset of popular blogs, known as the 'A-list.' This study empirically investigates the extent to which, and in what patterns, blogs are interconnected, taking as its point of departure randomly-selected blogs. Quantitative social network analysis, visualization of link patterns, and qualitative analysis of references and comments in pairs of reciprocally-linked blogs show that A-list blogs are overrepresented and central in the network, although other groupings of blogs are more densely interconnected. At the same time, a majority of blogs link sparsely or not at all to other blogs in the sample, suggesting that the blogosphere is partially interconnected and sporadically conversational.
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