Raw Thought

by Aaron Swartz

What Does Blogspace Look Like?

I’ve been analyzing the content of blogs lately, looking for patterns. It’s a huge amount of data, which makes for some tricky technical problems. Finally, tonight, thanks to some help from friends and the Large Graph Layout package, I’ve finally got some results. And they’re stunning. Ladies and gentlemen, the blogosphere:

graph of blogspace

And, for fun, let’s zoom in one one of those small splotches:

graph of the hitchens node

You should follow me on twitter here.

July 26, 2006

Comments

Interesting. So when do we get more details? How are you determining the proximity of concepts? And what are those three giant splotches in the middle?

posted by Scott Reynen on July 26, 2006 #

Bush, academia, and law, I think. As I said, this is just the very first result; hopefully I can share more interesting stuff later.

posted by Aaron Swartz on July 26, 2006 #

Aaron - where did you get your dataset from?

posted by Kunal on July 26, 2006 #

Kunal, you could work based off of Alexa’s platform and just fiddle with linking.

posted by Jeremy Dunck on July 26, 2006 #

The data is from http://feeds.reddit.com/.

posted by Aaron Swartz on July 26, 2006 #

The above graph appears to be a scale-free network (not surprising, really). Aaron, have you analyzed it with regard to its scale-free properties?

posted by Toby on July 26, 2006 #

Not surprisingly, it looks an awful lot like the most other small networks. Interesting to note are the patterns supported by the Power Law.

posted by greg on July 26, 2006 #

No chance to get an anti-aliased version of that graph to see a bit more of the structure? This is totally wicked.

posted by joe on July 26, 2006 #

…it would be cool to lay it out inside a 3D sphere… then it would really be the blogosphere.

posted by joe on July 26, 2006 #

That dataset of yours probably doesn’t have an open license? ;)

posted by Chris Laux on July 26, 2006 #

I don’t believe Reddit has an API yet.

posted by Kunal Anand on July 28, 2006 #

Very appealing; I would like to get more information on how you decomposed the data, and how you produced the layout.

posted by Matthieu Latapy on July 25, 2007 #

Very appealing; I would like to get more information on how you decomposed the data, and how you produced the layout.

posted by Matthieu Latapy on July 25, 2007 #

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