Blogosphere

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Blogosphere is a collective term encompassing all blogs and their interconnections. It is the perception that blogs exist together as a connected community (or as a collection of connected communities) or as a social network.

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[edit] History

The term was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke.[1] It was re-coined in 2002 by William Quick,[2] and was quickly adopted and propagated by the warblog community. The term resembles the older word logosphere (from Greek logos meaning word, and sphere, interpreted as world), the "the world of words", the universe of discourse.[citation needed]

Despite the term's humorous intent, CNN, the BBC, and National Public Radio's programs Morning Edition, Day To Day, and All Things Considered have used it several times to discuss public opinion. A number of media outlets in recent years have started treating the blogosphere as a gauge of public opinion, and it has been cited in both academic and non-academic work as evidence of rising or falling resistance to globalization, voter fatigue, and many other phenomena,[3] and also in reference to identifying influential bloggers[4] and "familiar strangers" in the blogosphere.[5][6]

[edit] Tracking

Sites such as Technorati, BlogPulse, Tailrank, and BlogScope track the interconnections between bloggers. Taking advantage of hypertext links which act as markers for the subjects the bloggers are discussing, these sites can follow a piece of conversation as it moves from blog to blog. These also can help information researchers study how fast a meme spreads through the blogosphere, in order to determine which sites are the most important for gaining early recognition.[7] Sites also exist to track specific blogospheres, such as those related by a certain genre, culture, subject matter or geopolitical location.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ The BradLands: Must See http://
  2. ^ DailyPundit.com (via Internet Archive)
  3. ^ Blogosphere: The new political arena, Michael Keren, 2006.
  4. ^ Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, Lei Tang, and Philip Yu. "Identifying Influential Bloggers in a Community", First International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM08), February 11-12, Stanford, California.
  5. ^ Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, John Salerno, and Philip Yu. "Searching for 'Familiar Strangers' on Blogosphere: Problems and Challenges", NSF Symposium on Next-Generation Data Mining and Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation. October 10-12, Baltimore, MD.
  6. ^ Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, Sudheendra Murthy, Arunabha Sen, and Xufei Wang. "A Social Identity Approach to Identify Familiar Strangers in a Social Network", 3rd Int'l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, May 17 - 20, 2009, San Jose, California.
  7. ^ Investigating the Impact of the Blogosphere: Using PageRank to Determine the Distribution of Attention, Kirchhoff, Bruns & Nicolai, 2007.

[edit] External links

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