Cameron Marlowe from Electronic Publishing Group at the MIT Media Laboratory -- his current project is the popular Blogdex -- has published his paper "Audience, Structure and Authority in the Weblog Community" (pdf-download) for the International Communication Association Conference.
Blogdex mainly tracks the diffusion of links/ideas through the population of webloggers to objectively describe the information epidemics that occur regularly within informal social networks (Link).
His paper instead brings the coherencies and background stories of two different metrics for measuring authority within weblogs (Blogroll and Permalink) into the light of day.
Marlowe assumes that the Blogroll is a proxy to popularity and the Permalink a proxy to influence. The paper (9 pages) is definetely worth reading:
Abstract: The weblog medium, while fundamentally an innovation in personal publishing has also come to engender a new form of social interaction on the web: a massively distributed but completely connected conversation covering every imaginable topic of interest. A byproduct of this ongoing communication is the set of hyperlinks made between weblogs in the exchange of dialog, a form of social acknowledgement on the part of authors. This paper seeks to understand the social implications of linking in the community, drawing from the hyperlink citations collected by the Blogdex project over the past 3 years. Social network analysis is employed to describe the resulting social structure, and two measures of authority are explored: popularity, as measured by webloggers’ public affiliations and influence measured by citation of each others writing. These metrics are evaluated with respect to each other and with the authority conferred by references in the popular press.
Conclusion: The initial excitement over the weblog power law made many webloggers uncomfortable. How can a person get excited about a medium where attention is garnered by the number of weeks one has participated? Looking only at popularity by blogroll rank, it does appear that the “rich get richer,” but another assessment of authority, permalinks, might be an equally good proxy to authority and a better measure of influence. Barabási has noted that the growth of scale free networks is not only determined by the age of nodes, but also by the node strength, an undefined property related to a node’s ability to acquire links. Permalink rank might be an accurate way of measuring node strength, and a better proxy to authority and influence at a given point in time.
It is a major advantage of scientific work in this field that -- blogging is still young -- the bibliography is somehow short. Btw: Marlowe runs a moblog with real strange =:-) pix.
"Nokia sucks: I had to send this from my Sony Ericsson because it ROCKS"
[© Cameron Marlowe].
