Discover magazine recently had an interesting article the connectedness of the blogosphere. Since the web is so dynamic, with new blogs being created almost constantly (about one every 2 seconds) and outdated blogs being deleted/disconnected from the connected component of the blogosphere at a similar (but much slower) rate, it is hard to model the exact state of the blogosphere at one point in time. As a result, social network expert Matthew Hurst gathered link data between blogs for six weeks and published a plot of the connectedness of the blogosphere. This graph produces some interesting results:

1. Certain website have significant prestige (similar to a high hub score in the HITS algorithm). The blog DailyKos has half a million visitors a day and as a result any link from DailyKos would cause the target of that link to increase in popularity dramatically. This prestige, however, builds on itself as now many other blogs will link to DailyKos. The huge white dot in the graph

2. Different online communities loosely separated with the rest of the blogosphere. The popular LiveJournal blogging community is large and well connected within itself but there are only (relatively) a few links between this mini-community and the most well-connected part of the blogosphere. Similarly, a sizable mini-community exists for blogs related to pornography, whethere it be news and information or actual pornography itself. Also, there is another outside group of bloggers: sports blogs. These blogs are also connected within themselves, but have the added property of linking in toward the large component of the blogosphere frequently. Again, there are fewer links to these mini-communities, as it seems to be somewhat separated from the rest of the blogosphere. What is interesting, however, is that technology and political blogs seem to be very well connected to the rest of the blogosphere. The white dot noted by the number 2 represents the blog Boing Boing, a very popular technology blog that links to many other tech blogs, is in the center of the most connected portion of the blogosphere. Similarly, Michelle Malkin’s (a popular syndicated columnist) blog is in the center of all the political blogs. Here we also have political blogs in the well-connected portion of the blogosphere.

These results seem to indicate that the type of blog is a significant determining factor in the importance or connectedness of the blog in the blogosphere as a whole. The fact that politics and techonology dominate the blogosphere is probably a result of the demographic of Internet users sophisticated enough to enter the blogosphere: those up to date with technology issues and those who have a strong opinion on current issues. The results from this study only seem to confirm what the state of the web seems to be.