Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

The Blogosphere Map is a tool for spreading the spread of ideas throughout a blogging community.

Browsing gives a "worm's eye view." We need a bird's eye view. Weblogs are a self-refererring medium. Weblogs are like the brain in terms of the density of interconnections that reflects not only events in the real world but also parses ideas and concepts that come from the blogosphere itself.

The Map supports the self-organization of the blogosphere, better than using complex ontologies. [He looks at Steve Cayzer who just spoke about the semantic web, but Steve favors the self-organizing of local ontologies, I believe.] He points to several tools, including blogwise.com and blogstreet.com, as examples of current attempts to map the blogosphere. He also mentions Daypop's word burst.

Now they're showing their Blosphere Map. It looks at blogs and measures similarity, including by looking at the links, and plots against time. In this example, they've been tracking 400 weblogs for a month. When looking for hits on "BlogTalk," red dots on a web of links indicate hits. The map indicates links in and out; Dave Winer's site is a central node. The red dots show up in sequence, representing the spread of the idea over time. A search on "salam" graphically shows his disappearance and subsequent reapparance. [Very cool. But how well will it scale?]