Blogs and Networks

Hyperlinks

Blogs contain a number of different kinds of hyperlinks. There are links for navigation, archives, to servers for embedded advertising, in comments, and to tracking services, among others. Most directly, blogs form networks by linking to one another. Most of these links fall mainly into two categories: static and dynamic. Static links are those that do not change very often and are typically found in the blogroll, a set of links a blogger chooses to place in a sidebar. Blogroll links are created for different motivations, but the network formed by them is relatively stable and often represents a collective picture of bloggers' perceptions of the blogosphere and their own positions within it. Dynamic links change frequently and are typically those embedded in individual blog posts. These represent a measure of a blogger's attention at a particular point in time. Not every blog is linked to every other blog. Some blogs have few links to other blogs, and some receive few links from other blogs. In contrast, a small number of blogs link to many blogs or are themselves linked to by many blogs. The distribution of links in the blogosphere conforms to a power-law, meaning that a very few blogs are linked to with great frequency, while the vast majority are only slightly connected.

The Blogosphere

The maximal network of Weblogs, or blogosphere, is often described as a kind of haystack, hierarchically organized with a famous A-list on top, with B through Z lists extending downward to a floor of complete obscurity. In fact, the blogosphere has a complex but ordered network structure, formed by billions of individual choices by millions of bloggers about whom and what to link to. Large-scale regularities in these choices result in pockets of network density around socially salient issues, such as politics, parenting, and economics, among many others. These blog network neighborhoods are composed of densely interconnected informational communities within which ideas and information spread quickly. The preferences that lead clusters of bloggers to link to one another with disproportionate frequency also lead these clusters to link preferentially to Web resources other than blogs, such as particular media sources, government information sources, or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Each cluster is thus like a lens, focusing attention on particular sets of online resources.

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