Blog mapping by domain

I was talking at work with Alex Pang and Jens Roland about ways to visualize sets of blogs on a certain topic. I think it was then Alex who suggested scraping the outgoing links of a number of blogs and cutting to the domain to see how much overlap there would be (does everyone link to Wikipedia and BBC news?). Here’s a first draft of 9 blogs about the future:

The graph shows the shared linked domains from May 2006 – April 2007. The cyan nodes are the blogs, clockwise from the top left is Accelerating Future, FuturePundit, Minding the Planet, Jon Udell, Science Library Pad, Future of the Book, Future Feeder, Open the Future, and FutureNow in the center. There were lots of other blogs on our combined list, but I took the ones most similar to FutureNow that had archive pages that I could scrape without having to follow each post. (Is there a better way to scrape blog feeds?)

The best way to look at this is as an image map with rollover URLs, but I can’t write map areas into this post. Here’s a work-around: drag the image to your desktop, download futureblogs.doc and change the extension to html.

Out of 3384 domains scraped altogether, these are the numbers of non-shared domains over the total domains for each blog. (This is the portion I took out to create the graph above)

Jon Udell 206/285
Science Library Pad 619/782
Minding the Planet 98/161
Future Feeder 89/119
Accelerating Future 157/245
Open the Future 313/466
Future Pundit 317/428
Future of the Book 524/675
FutureNow 668/884 (our del.icio.us stream comes in as posts, elevating this number)

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