A Map of the German Blogosphere
June 5th, 2008 — Bruce Etling
This is a social network map of the German blogosphere, created by John Kelly, our partner on Iranian and other blogosphere studies. German blogger Markus Beckedahl interviewed John about the map and his early findings. Berkman Center visiting researcher Jan Eilhard was kind enough to provide a summary translation of Markus’s post.
This post summarizes Podcast 057 with John Kelly, the founder of Morningside Analytics and a partner for the democracy and internet project at Berkman. Presenting an alpha-version of a map of the German blogosphere, he explains how mapping the blogosphere works: They used spiders to explore 10000 German blogs and all linked pages from these blogs. In a next step a scientific team familiar with the cultural background evaluates the blogs, sorts out spam-blogs and sites that are not blogs. At the same time they also evaluate several properties of the blog and the bloggers themselves, e.g. age, gender, blog topics etc. This material is updated regularly.
The analysis shows that a lot of blogs link with mass media, e.g. spiegel.de, heise.de. More interestingly, a large number of blogs appear to belong to spam blog networks, more than in other countries. Apart from the large chunk of general blogs, two clouds are noticeable, blogs on knitting and blogs on blogsport.de. They assume that Blogsport.de involves a lot of anti-fascist sites that link to each other. In contrast, right-wing blogs were more closely related to law blogs, suggesting that readers link to both types of blogs.
Comparing this with a map of the French blogosphere [see below], they see that in France the majority of blogs are hosted on one site, canalblog.com. John Kelly interprets the different pattern as signs for different degrees of maturity. The author is looking forward to seeing more results as well as a global map of the blogosphere and ends the article with a link to Ethan Zuckerman’s blog about John Kelly’s speech from the Media Re:public conference.
And here is the French Map referenced above:
You can catch the full podcast in English at the netzpolitik blog, as well as an old interview with Berkman Faculty Co-Director Yochai Benkler.
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