Looking at the blogosphere topology through different lenses

Abstract

The blogosphere is a vast and dynamic complex network. Any examination of the structure of such a network is dependent on the selection of blogs sampled and the time frame of the sample. By comparing two large blog datasets, we demon-strate that samples may differ significantly in their coverage but still show consistency in their aggregate network properties. We further compare the structure of a blog dataset with and without spam blogs, which account for a majority of the links in one sample. We also show that properties such as degree distributions and clustering coefficients depend on the time frame over which the network is aggregated.