Blog Neighbourhoods And Blog Rolls

Jacob Wood put together a network graph to illustrate connections between blogs and cluster them into rough "neighbourhoods". It's quite fun to look at! As someone who has a fair amount of historical context for the section of the blogosphere this seems to cover (politics/finance/econ), it's an odd combination of some very new (ACX) and some really, really old: there are some UK politics blogs in here that had basically stopped publishing around the time I started following blogs in the late 2000s.

The methodology here involved compiling the URLs from blogrolls—and I suspect that's why you see this weird admixture of old in with new. ACX was his starting point—a shot of the "new"—but, in my experience, at least, blogrolls tend to be quite "set-and-forget"—or at least if they're added to, they're not very often pruned back. Chris Dillow, one of my faves, has got stuff in his like Tribune, which only started publishing in late 2018, but also blogs which stopped publishing in 2016, and so you see a lot of stuff that provides me fond memories but isn't around any more.

Anyway, this spurred me to finally sort out my own blogroll which has been languishing in a state of "coming soon" for months. I will set myself a regular reminder to prune it, too, so if any enterprising person with a page scraper comes by, I will be ready for them.