Over the past decade, the number of blogs on the internet, and the connections between those blogs, have been growing at an enormous rate. There are blogs that discuss technology, blogs that discuss personal lives, and numerous blogs that discuss politics and news. In Issue Publics on the Web: Applying Network Theory to the War Blogosphere , a group at the University of Texas at Austin discuss the makeup and interconnections of the portion of the blogosphere concerned with the Iraq war. Their primary object is to observe and characterize the differences between the liberal and conservative blogs in the sphere of discussion.

One particular measure of each blog that the researchers examined was the number of incoming links to each blog. Larger numbers of incoming links was taken as an indication that a given blog held a powerful position in the network, as it was getting more attention than its peers. This connects nicely to the intuition about node power in graphs that we have been discussing in class. As we have seen, nodes that are in a more central position tend to have more power in the graph, and a larger number of incoming links indicates that a blog is likely to be relatively central in a network (especially using betweenness as the measure of centrality).

The group was able to determine the correlation between a number of different factors (number of authors, gender of the authors, types of posts, and number of outgoing links) and the number of incoming links to a given blog. Outgoing links had the largest correlation (again, indicating that blogs that are central clearing houses for information tend to have more power and influence in the graph), followed by the types of posts made.

All in all, this seems to be an interesting analysis of a very restricted subgraph of the larger internet. Because of its limited scope of study, the graph is both easier to understand and analyze, and could be a useful predictor for the behavior of graphs of blogs in general.