Identifying the Large-Scale Structure of the Blogosphere

We analyze a topological structure of networks formed according to the entries and trackbacks in the blogosphere, which is a collection of weblog articles. The analysis is performed based on community extraction, network visualization and keyword analysis. It is shown that the large-scale structure of the blogosphere has a globally sparse, but locally dense structure. The entries in a community yield a dense structure while the trackbacks that interconnect communities are sparse. The visualized results show sparkling-firework-like patterns. We then attempt to characterize the communities using a tf-idf technique. It is found that specific topics are discussed in each community. These