A Journey to the Core of the Blogosphere

Blogs are popular communication instruments in today´s web and altogether, they form the so-called blogosphere. This blogosphere has repeatedly been subject to structural analyses, and one of the findings has been the discovery of the A-List phenomenon, a cohesive group of influential blogs in the center of the blogosphere, whose exact identification remained an open issue. We use four language-specific subsets of the blogosphere, for which we aggregated the blogroll-based networks. We adapt core theory to analyse and compare the cohesion in these four data-sets, and provide a new scalable method for the identification of core-periphery structures in blog networks, which can contribute to identify A-List blogs more reliably.