KickIdle.com Blog

Blogs thrive on links, as most of those who write them know. Here’s an applet called Picture of Weblogs that displays the links between weblogs. Quite interesting. I think I would have sorted the entries so that those with more links were at the inside of the spiral. I’m not sure that would have been an improvement, but it would seem to be better than the pseudo-random distribution used.
KickIdle.com is listed, you can find it using the search box.
I suspect there’s a whole slew of interesting topological information about weblog interconnectedness. For example, if you partition them according to political views, I would expect to see high intereconnectedness in each partition and weak cross-partion linking. It would also be interesting to partition them according to what back-end software is used. Do blogs which use Blogger tend to link to blogs that also use Blogger? Is there any group of software users that tend to link inside their partition or outside their partition? How about partitioning the set based on sex? Based on group blogs v. individual blogs?
You could create a directed graph with each edge being the reverse direction of a link (i.e. if I link to InstaPundit, then there’s an edge from Instapundit to KickIdle.) Then map the flows in the graph and blogs which are sources may tend to introduce new information into the blogosphere, while blogs which are sinks (or unconnected) are not responsible for propogating new ideas.
Well, you get the idea. Unfortunately, I’m sure that would require much more information than included in the xml file the applet uses.
Sounds like a good thesis for a sociology/computer science degree though. Really, blogs are like a specialized society ripe for sociological study. We (blog authors) tend to publicly declare our affiliations and publicly attribute our ideas and attitudes. I’d imagine that makes our interactions much easier to study than a society which operates in private or semi-public (as most real-life “meat” societies would).