Communities and Connectors in the Blogosphere
I wish I could be like Jon Udell (and others) who are programmers that can immediately implement their ideas. Today, Jon did some thinking about Social Networking in Radiospace, and then he proceeded to visualize it.
"Last week I collected fifteen channelrolls and did some analysis of them. One set of results can be viewed at http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/gems/radioSocialNet.html. The Python script that contains the raw data and emits the visualization is at http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/gems/channelroll.txt.
At the core of the script is a Python object called a SequenceMatcher, which can compare two lists -- in this case, two channelrolls -- and produce a similarity ratio. Two instances of the same channelroll yield a value of 1. Two channelrolls that have no subscriptions in common yield a value of 0.
As you'd expect, clusters emerge....
Even more than similarities, I was looking for differences. There is a certain sameness to a lot of the blogrolls I see. Many of those first attracted to blogging share interests in software and networking. To a first approximation, blogspace today is a community of like-minded people. But we're starting to see hives emerge. Among Radio bloggers, for example, clusters of lawyers and academics have appeared.
It's useful to identify yourself with a cluster of like-minded people. It may be even more useful to locate clusters of differently-minded people whose activities complement your own. Jenny Levine, for example, is a gateway to a world of librarians who see information technology very differently than hardcore techies do. Of the fourteen non-Jenny lists, those of Sam Ruby, Gordon Weakliem, and I were, again not surprisingly, most unlike Jenny's.
For a techie crowd, Jenny is a connector into a network of people who need to use information technology in certain ways. Techies who would like to respond to those needs would do well to pay attention to them. Visible subscription lists are one of the ways in which disparate groups can seek out points of connection.
Connections are of course multiple and overlapping. In this sample, Jenny Levine and Jim McGee have a strong mutual correlation. But although I am weakly related to Jenny, I'm strongly related to Jim. Again this doesn't surprise me, as we share interests in knowledge management and organizational dynamics.
Jenny's chart shows a strong bimodal pattern. She correlates strongly with one set of lists (roughly speaking, non-techies), and weakly with another set (techies). Interestingly, this bimodal pattern is masked in a chart that simply averages the correlations for all fifteen charts:
What this might mean, if anything, I leave to others to speculate about. It's clear to me, though, that there are many dimensions of relatedness. Google, for example, sees me as more closely related to Jenny, and her to me, than do my subscription-driven charts. I'm sure that both measures are true in different ways.
As we narrate our working lives online, and intertwine with other working lives, the data trails we create will yield richer and more complex visualizations."
Like Jon, I'm also fascinated by the differences. I love that he's thinking about this stuff! It all dovetails nicely with today's article Blogosphere: the Emerging Media Ecosystem by John Hiler.
"Bloggers and Journalists form a blogging biosphere that has become an ecosystem in its own right, an ecosystem that one savvy blogger has dubbed the Blogosphere. The word was meant as a clever pun combining 'Blog' with 'logos', a Greek word meaning logic and reason. And while bloggers do often use logic in dissecting arguments, I love the word Blogosphere because it happens to capture another truth: the Blogosphere is a biosphere of its own, a Media Ecosystem that lives and breathes just like any other biological system.
Like any ecosystem, the Blogosphere demonstrates all the classic ecological patterns: predators and prey, evolution and emergence, natural selection and adaptation. I've often thought that anthropologists were best equipped to deconstruct the emerging blogging sub-culture, but now I'm convinced I got it wrong: the greater mysteries of the Blogosphere will be unlocked instead by evolutionary biologists....
Something about the Blogosphere gives it the feel of a living breathing ecosystem.
Like any ecosystem, the Blogosphere has a life of its own, one that's more than the sum of its weblogs. You can't understand a jungle by studying a single jaguar, and in the same way you can't understand the Blogosphere by studying a single weblog. Surfing the Blogosphere you can see evolutionary forces play out in real time, as weblogs vie for niche status, establish communities of like-minded sites, and jostle for links to their site."
Except that most of the bloggers I know aren't jostling for links to their site. They're just getting their ideas and information out there to anyone anywhere. Finding the connections (paging James Burke!) between channel-rolls is one way to study the living, breathing Blogosphere.
Bill Kearney really took my mind for a ride when he mentioned the application of GIS to blogging. There's a whole new way to visualize the blogosphere! Even though geography should be irrelevant, there are still underlying connections that need to be made and examined. (We should be pursuing metadata more actively as one method of achieving this goal.)
First, though, John Hiler needs to update his idea of the Blogosphere to include news aggregators. They're a huge influence that will only continue to grow. Just check out Jon Udell's other article of the day, Personal RSS Aggregators, for some reasons why. The Blogosphere would not be growing at the exponential rate it is without them. They're you're friends, and to paraphrase the immortal words of another Jon (Lovitz), "Get to know them!"
Also, I had another little mind-bomb develop tonight thanks to James Linden. There was no better illustration of my new life as a "connector" than my conversations with him today, along with current and past discussions with Ernest Miller. I can't be less cryptic than that right now because I have to do some homework first, but if the idea pans out, it would be an incredible example of the power of the Blogosphere! Hopefully more on this in the future....
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