Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis "From the Bottom Up"

The "blogosphere" has been claimed to be a densely interconnected conversation, with bloggers linking to other bloggers, referring to them in their entries, and posting comments on each other\´s blogs. Most such characterizations have privileged a subset of popular blogs, known as the \´A-list.\´ This study empirically investigates the extent to which, and in what patterns, blogs are interconnected, taking as its point of departure randomly-selected blogs. Quantitative social network analysis, visualization of link patterns, and qualitative analysis of references and comments in pairs of reciprocally-linked blogs show that A-list blogs are overrepresented and central in the network, although other groupings of blogs are more densely interconnected. At the same time, a majority of blogs link sparsely or not at all to other blogs in the sample, suggesting that the blogosphere is partially interconnected and sporadically conversational.