New Map of the Blogsphere

[james_davis_nicoll]

Charting the network of jocks, gadget hounds, political junkies, and porn aficionados



1: Daily Kos, tough on BushCo, soft on death-threats against women (the little darlings).

2: Boingboing. Well, at least it isn't Aintitcool.

3: The lost souls of Livejournal, little-known and too self-absorbed to care. Oooo, a reflective surface!

4: Highly interconnected blogs. The bright dot is Michelle Malkin. Note that when I say "bright dot", the map is not the territory.

5: The pornoverse, almost as peripheral as LJ and if not self-absorbed, definitely focused.

6: The jocks, making their way through the blogosphere with that endearing squinched up expression, like a Neanderthal presented with a laptop.

Comments

[ionlylurkhere.livejournal.com]

Is it just me, or are LJ and the similar arc at the bottom on the RHS that isn't labelled (myspace?) the jocks' Trojans? Though interpreting the map that way does put DKos as the Sun.

[ionlylurkhere.livejournal.com]

Just had a bit more of a look, and the guy behind the image has a few other visualisations of the data on his site, the first of which shows LJ much more prominently (as far as I can tell, this is because it ignores whether links are reciprocated).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

So... LiveJournal isn't self-absorbed, it's just that nobody links to it.

Part of the reason for that may be that LJ doesn't prominently display permalinks to articles--you can get a permalink by clicking on the comments link, but that's not obvious.

Or maybe LiveJournalers just write crappy blogs.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And I now realize that many LJ styles do have permalinks, which strengthens the "crap" hypothesis.

[ionlylurkhere.livejournal.com]

To play devil's advocate, I think the "12 year old girls being drama queens about their friends list" prejudice is widely held in the blogosphere as a whole, which probably means that a) there are a lot of people who do assume LJ is full of crap, and b) even the people who don't assume that know that the people who do won't take a link to LJ seriously, so avoid linking to it, even if there's an individual post they think is good.

OTOH, I do think a lot of LJ is crap by the standards of the blogosphere, simply because it's a weird hybrid between a blog and a diary that you let everyone read. LJers are forever posting memes and cute pictures of cats and whatever silly thing pops into their head, whereas the really popular blogs are the ones with a strong focus on one topic. (Where comms fit into this I'm not sure.)

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Heck, I think of my LJ as a place to post stupid youtube videos of Godzilla rampaging through Mario world, as well as personal updates for the handful of people who know me from rl and read the lj. Back when I was making a pretense of serious blogging did that stuff somewhere else.

LJers are forever posting [...] cute pictures of cats

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

One phrase: "bacon cat."

Also, I just looked at Kathryn Cramer's site and it is not entirely feline-free,

[jwgh]

It seems like a common progression in Livejournal is: person has friends (online or not) who use livejournal, person gets Livejournal account to make it easier to comment on other peoples' livejournals and read friends-only entries, person starts using Livejournal to blog, and the rest is history. The strong pull of step 2 may be an additional reason why Livejournal posts are mostly linked to by other Livejournal users, although there is a certain something about the 'crap' hypothesis that makes me reluctant to rule it out.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, LJs tend not to have "blogrolls" beyond the friends list, which discourages people outside the LJ garden from blogrolling them.