Mathemagenic

A bit of a follow-up for Weblog networks as social ecosystems.

Let's say that there are cases then community-like structures emerge as a result of connections between bloggers. This is immediately brings a few questions:

• What is their nature? How do we call them? They are probably not communities, but more loosely-coupled networks of people. Mainly weak ties, but still high degree of awareness of each other.
• How do we find them? There is no single "community space", just interconnected networks of weblogs. Where would you draw a boundary?
• What are their characteristics? How and when do they develop? change? die?

Hope to find answers one day... So far just a couple of things:

A. Before there is a good term I'm going to call them "weblog communities".

B. How to define who belongs to a weblog community:

1. People who say they belong together - interviews? 
2. People with similar focus - directories? topicExchange?
3. People who share language - content analysis? trend discovery?
4. People who link to each other weblogs (using blogroll links and/or links in the text and remembering that these are different) - link analysis?
5. People who read each other weblogs on regular basis (e.g. using RSS subscriptions) - RSS Neighborhood?
6. Some/all of the above? Something else?

For an inspiration: 

• The function of language to facilitate and maintain social networks in research weblogs by Stephanie Hendrick
• Mapping weblog communities by Juan-J. Merelo-Guervos, Beatriz Prieto, Fatima Rateb, Fernando Tricas
• A topic sharing infrastructure for weblog networks by Sebastien Paquet & Phillip Pearson 
• Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community by Cameron Marlow
• Alex Halavais on connections and network visualisation in academic weblogs (for a side-trip check follow-up discussion on references as popolarity measure: David Brake, Seb Paquet and Alex)
• Of course, you may also read other papers on mapping various things in the blogosphere (here or here), but they are not really on communities :)

This post also appears on channel weblog research