The social dynamic of blogosphere

A blogosphere is a set of blogs or all of its editors. The phrase blogosphere thus refers to all of the blogs. It is a subset of the World Wide Web.

The term blogosphere can be qualified: one can thus speak of art blogosphere, sport blogosphere, etc.

Several sites list and analyze community trends, such as Technorati. Some also evaluate the market value (as an advertising space) of blogs. Other sites constitute blogging communities and include exclusive articles on the most common themes (web, high-tech, fashion …) thus propelling new or experienced bloggers to the front of the stage.

Some also see in the blogosphere a corpus and an exploitable material (by data mining), from which can be extracted information of social, scientific or socio-economic interest, trends of prospective interest, based on the the country, the treated topics or the age or gender of the bloggers.

Social dynamics

The blogosphere seems to follow a power law (scalant law), according to which some elements concentrate the majority of popularity. Like any other human social group, the effects of the group (sympathy, antipathy, leadership …) appear regularly in the Blogosphere.

“Freedom of choice makes the star domsystem inevitable

… The model supposes that subsequent users take place in an environment distorted by previous users; the thousandth and first user will not randomly choose weblogs, but will rather be influenced, even if unconsciously, by the preferences expressed in the system before.

This model is completely silent as to why one weblog may be preferred to another. (…) What matters is that any tendency towards consensus in a free system, whatever its power and reason, can create a distribution in the law of powers.

Because this happens naturally, changing this distribution would mean forcing hundreds of thousands of bloggers to create links to certain weblogs and remove those to other weblogs, which would require both a broad organization and the use of force. Reversing the stardom system would mean destroying the village in order to save it.”