Thursday February 15, 2007
Picturing the Summit of the Blogosphere
I love visualizations which turn complex information into a simple picture. This one, from Ben Fry shows how the fifty most popular blogs in the world exchanged hyperlinks over a ninety-day period. See his description for full details, but in short:
The first [image], used for an article titled Linkology, shows the connections between the top 50 blogs, based on data provided by Technorati. The colors depict the categorization: orange for technology, blue for politics, pink for gossip, and green for "other".
The intensity of the line is based on the direction of the link, so the lines are brightest at the link destinations. Because lower-ranked blogs are more likely to link to a higher ranked blog than vice-versa, the lefthand side of the image (the top ranked blogs) is brightest.
In other words, we can see that the most popular blogs (on the left of the picture) get the most incoming links because their ends of the lines are brighter. And the large number of lines overall shows us how frequently top blogs reference one another.
The guys at Table of Malcontents think that the picture demonstrates how "professional bloggers are, at best, symbiotic parasites" (because they use information from other blogs to fuel their own). I'm not sure that the image supports such a conclusion. To me, the picture isn't noteworthy for unearthing some surprising trend. The web is made up of hyperlinks, and the most popular sites receive more inbound links than do less popular sites. No shock there.
It's noteworthy just because it's a great picture and makes a trend very easy to see and understand.
Tags: benfry blogs hyperlinks linkology visualization
Posted at 02:02PM Feb 15, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Web 2.0 | Comments[1]
Why is the Digg Community So Sensitive to Competition?
The Digg community is once again lashing out at a "shameless rip-off" site. This time their target is Yahoo, which has (in their own words) added "Digg-style voting" to their suggestion boards. There was a similar reaction months ago when Netscape.com re-launched itself as a voter-driven news portal.
Why do so many Digg users have a hair-trigger response against anyone who builds on Digg's ideas? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Imitation with due credit (as Yahoo provided in their blog post) is pretty-well beyond reproach.
Yes, Yahoo and Netscape took ideas from Digg. That's the way the world works. We build off of each others' ideas. If you can't accept that, you need to strip naked and move to some deserted cave. Every technology and idea we use today is a derivative of something which came before it.
If you think the "good guys" of the tech world sprang up from great new ideas, you're wrong (at least partially). The ideas may have been great, but they were never entirely new. So before you launch another campaign against a "shameless rip-off" of Digg, consider going after:
- Linux, which shamelessly stole the design of UNIX.
- Apache, which shamelessly stole the idea of serving web pages from Tim Berners-Lee.
- Firefox, which shamelessly stole the idea of a graphical web browser from NCSA Mosaic.
- Digg itself, which shamelessly stole the concept of voting from the ancient Greeks.
- The paranoid members of the Digg community, who shamelessly stole the ideas of intolerance and isolationism from countless ancient tribes.
Yes, they're ridiculous examples. It's a ridiculous discussion. Building on the ideas of others is a fact of life. It's also a fact of Web 2.0, and it's time for lagging members of the Digg community to accept it.
Tags: digg netscape web2.0 yahoo
Posted at 10:04AM Feb 15, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Web 2.0 | Comments[4]
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