Blog network analysis

Connectedness is approaching the end of its ten-day reign on the "Blogs of Note" list. It's been fun getting all the extra traffic and comments from newcomers to the world of social network analysis. Anybody wondering what I am talking about may appreciate jumping to this welcome post.

I have kept a close eye on my traffic since 06-06-06, and the statistics are dramatic. The chart below shows how the blogger.com home page went from nowhere to being 95% of my traffic overnight.
The thing that has really puzzled me about the above chart is how being at the top of the ten blogs of note (as Connectedness was for 24 hours starting 9am PDT Tue 6/6, and as Farmgirl Fare is right now) is so different from being anywhere else on the list.

Are web surfers so mindless that we nearly always click on the top of the list, no matter what appears below it?

I recovered some of my faith in web-surfer intelligence and deepened my appreciation for the complexity of "blog network analysis" when I realized that not everyone sees the same thing when they point their browser at http://blogger.com. When I logged off the Blogger.com system and looked at it from a newcomer's perspective, the top ten "Blogs of Note" went away and I got this subscription screen instead, which only lists today's singular blog of note:
Moral of the story: It's easy to jump to the wrong conclusions from a network analysis if you forget that we (even websites) personalize the referrals that we share depending on who is asking.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2006 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.