State of the Blogosphere/Live Web:Maps

Nielsen's Matthew Hurts recently drafted a graphic map showing the blogosphere in links. This picture is based on an examination of six weeks of blogosphere data.

Each little white dot represents a blog. The bigger white dots represent blogs with more incoming and outgoing links, while the smaller dots are blogs with fewer links.

The green lines represent one-way links from one blog to another, and the blue lines show reciprocal links, or blogs that link back and forth to one another regularly.

-The biggest white dots are popular blogs like Boing Boing and the Daily Koz.
-That isolated streak of green in the upper right hand (by the number three) shows LiveJournal blogs. LiveJournal users tend to link heavily to other LiveJournal blogs, but don't communicate as frequently with the outside world.
-The blue spots show bloggers who frequently link back and forth, possibly writing responses on their own blogs to items they've read on other sites and vice versa.
-Number 5 shows the fringe community of bloggers who share pornographic images and write about adult industry news and gossip.
-Number 6 sports enthusiasts who are a bit more linked into the rest of the mainstream blogosphere than the pornography enthusiasts or LiveJournal bloggers. But it's still a distinct community with users communicating primarily amongst themselves.

Similarly, here is Brian Shaler's Map of the Digg Universe


And Opte Project's massive Map of the Internet and animation.