Emergence and Blogs Tomorrow I'm giving a talk for the Emergence Research Group on Emergence and Blogs. Here are my notes and links.

First, let me announce that I am an avid blogger (twice-nominated for a blog award) but not a scientist or mathematician or sociologist. I am fascinated by blogging and its emergent properties. So, I may not be able to fully explain all the math, but together we can tease out the implications of emergence in blogging and media and education and anything else we can think of.

Blogs make up a complex network, a scale-free network, in fact, as described by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi in Linked. He and his team were actually looking at the web more generally, but since blogs are part of the web, they follow the same structure. Scale-free networks contain hubs that are more highly connected that other nodes. Think in terms of airport hubs. The power law phenomena can be observed in blog networks.

One thing I want to think about is the connected between the blog network and the people behind the blogs. What effect does a person's personality have on the likelihood that he/she will be linked to? Or are the connections simply following the laws of the network?

Here are some examples of emergent blog activity that may get us thinking about these questions (and more!)

First, a study of blogs during the 2004 election cycle. A picture is worth 1000 words.



The colors reflect political orientation,red for conservative, and blue for liberal. Orange links go from liberal to conservative, and purple ones from conservative to liberal. The size of each blog reflects the number of other blogs that link to it.

What Adamic and Glance found was that, in general, blogs of a color stuck together. Not only do blogs of a particular leaning tend to link to similar blogs, but blogs in one category tend to link to similar msm sources. For example, liberal blogs are more likely to link to the NY Times than conservative ones.

Is the clustering around political ideology a negative outcome? How representative of the blogosphere as a whole is this? In other words, do people whose blogs aren't political in nature tend to cluster this way? Can we break free? We'll see more about this in a minute.

Let's shift to something more positive. One of the functions of the blogosphere, seemingly, has been to call attention to underreported news stories. An example of this happened in Philadelphia this summer when Latoyia Figueroa, a 24-year-old pregnant woman disappeared. While CNN and other major news outlets were focused on Natalee Holloway, an upper middle-class Alabama girl who'd disappeared earlier in the summer, local bloggers tried to get them to pay attention to Figueroa's story.

Here's the chronicle of that effort, including links to bloggers who joined in the "swarm" effort to gain the attention of the media. The Inquirer and CNN finally took up the story, 10 days after she'd disappeared and 6 days after blogger Richard Blair began reporting it.

Bloggers also raised money for tsunami relief, hurricaine katrina relief, and continually work to raise money for various causes. They also had the first pictures of these events, and others, such as the London Underground bombing.

Let's talk about Google Bombing. Because of the way Google works and because of the structure of the network, sites that are linked to using certain words rise up the ranks in Google. So, for example, if lots and lots of people use the words miserable failure to link to George Bush's biography, when someone searches for "miserable failure" in Google, it's more likely that the first link on the page will be to George Bush's biography. Most people usually click on the first link they see in the search results, again increasing that site's rank in that particular search. The "miserable failure" Google bomb is mostly for fun and games, but some are of real significance. For example, one might think that doing a Google search for Roe v. Wade would take you to the case itself. For a while, that wasn't true. The first link when doing a search for Roe v. Wade was actually to a right to life site. Thanks in part to a Google Bomb campaign by bloggers, the first link is to the case itself. In fact, as a result of the Alito confirmation hearings, most of the first results are to the case or to other pro-choice related resources.

Okay, so what does all this mean?

A personal look. Here's a sampling of my own network.


And another section:

¶ 8:53 PM, posted by Laura