I wrote some quick code to run on Virginia Political Blogs that would calculate the most-linked bloggers in the system. It runs through every contributing blog’s URL and searches for all instances of it on blogs other than those maintained by that blog’s author. Then a tally is provided for each blog, listing the total number of links that the total number of blogs that provided those links. Below is the top ten list that resulted from that math, based on the past 30 days of posts.
| Name | Mentions | Blogs |
|---|---|---|
| Not Larry Sabato | 60 | 19 |
| Raising Kaine | 28 | 18 |
| Waldo Jaquith | 30 | 16 |
| Virginia Virtucon | 31 | 12 |
| Black Velvet Bruce Li | 31 | 12 |
| Vivian Paige | 17 | 10 |
| Bearing Drift | 14 | 10 |
| Daily Whackjob | 18 | 9 |
| Too Conservative | 12 | 8 |
| Virginia Federalist | 9 | 7 |
This might get fun if I also included the total output, in number of entries from each blog, to determine which blogger has the greatest concentration of links per blog entry. I have so many short little blog entries on this site that there’d certainly be no danger of my being in the top ten. There are probably also some other interesting ways to slice up this data — I’m certainly open to suggestions.
See also my April post, “Ten most prolific political bloggers.”
It is interesting that you didn’t find any blogs on your list being linked lost of times by only a couple of blogs.
I like the idea of output vs. links data. Are the most linked to blogs the ones that post so much stuff that enough of it sticks or are they legitimately the ones who provide more bang for virtual buck when posting?
Also, I like that you list links and number of blogs seperately. Kinda show the echo effect and the like.
Also, it’d be interesting to see how many of those blogs are the same blogs linking to many different sites. Sorta, are certain blogs filling certain niches or are they being viewed and linked across the spectrum? Are these numbers pretty partisan or do certain blogs get the attention of both sides?
I do find it interesting that no more than twenty blogs linked to any one site over the last thirty days. Is the blogosphere smaller than one might think?
That may be a function of the blogs listed in my aggregator. Several people who participate in circle-linking have opted out of the aggregator, and a couple of others I’ve chosen not to include.
Jason, I love your idea of illustrating who links to whom. I lack the expertise to put together a map, but perhaps there’s somebody out there with the coding kung-fu to create a graphical indicator of who links to whom. I bet it would show a few clusters that link to each other often, with the majority of blogs existing as points unto themselves. You’re probably right about the size of the Virginia political blogosphere — it might be large, but a great many people aren’t interconnected with that particular group. They may well be interconnected with other groups (libertarian bloggers, milbloggers, eco-bloggers, etc.), but that wouldn’t show up in these data.
Hey, I am just glad the The Virginian Federalist is up there. Jason, would be quite interesting to see that data.
Waldo, I couldn’t find it right now but I used to know of a web site that did a “map of the internet” showing how every page was linked with every other page. I remember it being in Java, and should be liftable for your purposes, if you can figure out how to find it.
I thought I had it in my favorites, but I couldn’t find it.