Matthew Hindman talks about mapping traffic between political websites. He shows a way cool animated graphic of traffic between sites. Mainly the cross-position traffic is name-calling. 45% of the conservative traffic goes to FreeRepublic.com because it gives lots of links to the five other largest conservative sites. Liberal site are less concentrated.

Lada Adamic breaks the male-only panelist barrier. She teaches at U of Michigan and talks about how cascades happen. The fact that nodes cluster doesn’t mean that all the power is in the hub nodes. A meme can start on a small site and spread to the hub nodes. In a “barbell distribution,” it’d be interesting to see how info flows.

Tony Conrad of Sphere.com talks about his service that seems to be the anti-Technorati. He stresses that Sphere.com does not rank purely (or mainly?) on how heavily linked a site is. For example, it gives special weight to the first post on a topic.

Matthew Hurst of BuzzMetrics shows a graphic of an overview of the Blogosphere. [Why think that the Web has a top-down view?] The social political blogs are at the center of the English-speaking Blogosphere. Geographically, LiveSpace bloggers are spread out in a way that maps roughly to the Blue States. Xanga, meanwhile, maps to Red states.

Marc Smith of Microsoft Research shows his graphic display of Usenet interactions. He concludes by pointing out that we’re leaving traces behind everywhere we go.

Q: (me) The maps that show the gap between sides are used often to demean the Internet because it’s just a re-concentration. But the question is whether the Net makes us more democratic than before (as per Yochai Benkler and Mary Hodder). What do we compare those with? With how many dinnertime conversations fairly include the opposition point of view? Barroom conversations? Even articles in magazines?

Q: (Jeff Jarvis) Blogs aren’t trying to be media. It’s people in conversation. How many times do Democrats hang out at Republicans meet-ups? Vice versa? But together they do make democracy.

Q: How does what you do help Microsoft’s business? [very rough paraphrase!]
A: The future of computing is social.

[Does the online Contemporary American Literature group have to have 50% of its links going to romance novel sites and medieval discussion groups or else democracy has failed on the Web?] [Tags: annenberg hyperlinkedsociety maps politics]

Categories: Uncategorized dw