On Tuesday we celebrated the book launch of Frank Meeuwsen’s Bloghelden, a history of the Dutch blogosphere from 1995 to 2005, at SETUP in Utrecht. I was asked to give a presentation on a project Esther Weltevrede and I are working on: Mapping the Dutch blogosphere over time.
Photo by danischouten
In his article ‘Links, Lives, Logs: Presentation in the Dutch Blogosphere’ from 2003 author Frank Schaap distinguishes two types of bloggers in the Dutch blogosphere: the lifeloggers and the linkloggers.1 These two types of blogs, the lifelogs and the linklogs, have very specific and different linking patterns. Anno 2010 we can distinguish a new type of blog: the platformlog.
The aim of this study is to map changing blogging practices within the Dutch blogosphere. This may be done by looking at changing linking practices and studying the linking structure of the Dutch blogosphere.
Method
Create a startlist of URLs. In this casestudy we compiled a list from experts: Arie Altena, Gert-Jan Lasterie, Frank Meeuwsen's Bloghelden book, Merel Roze's article on the Dutch Blogosphere in Schrijven Voor Het Web, and Frank Schaap's article. In the future this list will be supplemented with the Webloglijst (an early semi-manual Technorati) and Nedstat top 1000 weblogs’ statistics.
Create hyperlink networks over time with the Issuecrawler.
Preliminary findings
Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Hyves and other social media platforms appear as important actors within the network. In this sample of May 2010 Twitter is the dominant platform in the Dutch blogosphere receiving 34484 links from the crawled population. In 2010 social media platforms receive the most links from the crawled population indicating their prominence on the web and in the blogosphere. Claim: We have moved from a bloggers A-list to a platform A-list consisting of a top three of: Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. The linking structure of the Dutch blogosphere anno 2010 is characterized by social media platforms.
Maps
Click on the maps to download a hi-res PDF file (around 800K).
Social media platforms in the Dutch blogosphere
Dutch Blogosphere on 18 May 2010
Further research
Look up URLs in the Internet Archive and create a special collection by archiving them. Visualize hyperlink networks over time with Gephi.
How do linking practices change and which clusters emerge? When do the social media platforms arrive?
Diagnosing the current condition of the early Dutch blogosphere.
Sick and tired of using Arial, Verdana and Georgia on your blog? Ok, I must admit, I love Georgia and I’ve been using it for years but after a while you want something else. There simply aren’t enough websafe fonts that look good and are compatible. There are several solutions like replacing the header with images (SEO-FAIL!) or Flash (mobile, anyone?) and more recently Typekit. I got a Typekit account months ago but never got around to implementing it because it looked so cumbersome. And now, our friend Google, released the Google Font API and it’s foolproof. Even though Typekit has way more fonts the simplicity of the Google Font API is wonderful.
Their instructions on how to use their fonts on your website are in plain English but here’s the translation to WordPress:
Add a stylesheet link to request the desired web font(s) in header.php:
XKCD has been one of my favorite sites for a few years now. The cartoons are always geeky, snarky and very often concern contemporary new media issues. This one on blogging is, once again, just hilariously exemplary of the blogging industry:
XKCD makes me *smirk* while doing research, for example this oldie on Twitter as exemplary of the real-time web:
In my 2008 thesis on ‘Blogging for Engines. Blogs under the Influence of Software-Engine Relations‘ in the chapter on the History of Blog Software and Blog Engines I wrote about Dave Winer’s role within the pre-blog BBS-scene and his DaveNet (1994) and Scripting News (1997). Back then I used the Internet Archive to track down the history of the early blogosphere and Rudolf Ammann is using the same technique. Dave Winer actually responded to his blog post on ‘Scripting News: Launched on 1 February 1997‘ that if we were to point to DaveNet as a blog (with its reverse-chronological entries) that October 7, 1994 is the day it all started for Dave Winer.
Blogging is often seen as a new form of journalism, an online diary or a democratising medium which potentially gives every citizen a voice. However, what can we say about blogging and the blogosphere if we look at blogs from within the medium? In other words, what is blogging when we look at the software blogs are made with?
Anne Helmond graduated from the University of Amsterdam with a study on WordPress, the leading blog software. This research focuses on how blog software and search engines arose at the same time (1999) and have since established a tight relationship. What does this mean for bloggers, blogs and the blogosphere if we look beyond search engine optimization?
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