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Last week we looked at Ben Fry’s Atari 2600 Cartridge Source Code project, which used game source code to make attractive, data-rich images. But Mr. Fry has a lot of other interesting projects, including an illustration for a New York Magazine article entitled Linkology that demonstrates how blogs link to each other in a sort of “global popularity poll” (also read: how the image was created).
In Fry’s image, he presents blogs in a list from left to right, with the more popular blogs starting to the left (at the far left are Boing Boing, Engadget, and PostSecret). Colored lines connect the blogs when they link to each other, with the color of the line getting brighter as it approaches the source of the article being linked to. Different colored lines denote different topics (technology, politics, etc.). The cumulative effect demonstrates the intensive interlinking of blogs, and shows a cascading effect as content starts at the major blogs and is linked to by smaller blogs down the line.
Is it just me, or is there an echo in here?
Comments (3)
Comment
Except content doesn’t start at the major blogs. It also flows UP. I often see a story or item at my usual sources for a couple days before it hits Boingboing, after which none of the second-tier linkblogs will touch it. They figure by the time it gets to Boingboing, everyone has seen it.
posted by Miss Cellania on 2-14-2007 at 7:09 pm
Certainly the majority of content that appears on Boing Boing is via some other, smaller blog — but the image appears to show that once a story makes it to Boing Boing, that instance of the story is picked up by many others in the cloud.
The image does not show the original source of the blog content, which would probably tell a more interesting (and complex) story.
posted by Higgins on 2-15-2007 at 10:42 am
There’s a good discussion of the nuances of this chart over at Table of Malcontents.
I think my post wasn’t specific enough in what the chart discusses, and I implied that it said more than it did. The chart simply show interlinking among semi-major blogs, without any notion of the original source of the content (which would probably be the more interesting thing to learn about…). In this chart, the “source” of material is simply the instance of a story that’s most cited, but as we well know, blogs commonly pass on content from each other.
So I think this chart is showing how big blogs are echoing content among themselves…with no real visibility into where that content is coming from originally.
;Chris
posted by Higgins on 2-19-2007 at 9:41 pm