A journey to the core of the blogosphere

Abstract

Blogs are popular communication instruments in today's web and altogether, they form the so-called blogosphere. This blogosphere has repeatedly been subject to structural analyses, and one of the findings has been the discovery of the A-List phenomenon, a cohesive group of influential blogs in the center of the blogosphere, whose exact identification remained an open issue. We use six language-specific subsets of the blogosphere, for which we aggregated the blogroll-bascd networks. We adapt core theory to analyse and compare the cohesion in these six data sets, and provide a new robust and scalable method for the identification of core-periphery structures in blog networks, which can contribute to identify A-List blogs more reliably. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness by comparing the results to random networks and by cross-checking the six language data sets. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Wien.