Mapping the global blogosphere

Across the world, online publics are forming via the Internet. In societies on one side of the digital divide, millions of bloggers come together around diverse topics, forming complex clusters. In societies on the other side, dozens or hundreds of bloggers form tighter communities, often in the face of censorship and conflict. In all cases, these bloggers form networks which can be studied and mapped using the techniques of social network analysis. Unique as a snowflake, each map reveals the footprints of politics, culture, business, and other characteristics of particular societies. Furthermore, these individual networks actually prove not to be very individual at all. Rather, they are all just neighborhoods of the global Blogosphere, where the connections between online publics prove to be just as interesting as those within them. Using new techniques for mapping online publics, we tour of a number of individual (small-'b') blogospheres within the global (big-'B') Blogosphere. We then look at some particular examples of how they connect to each other, and for what reasons. How are English-language bloggers connected with Arabic bloggers? How do Indian and Pakistani bloggers connect? Finally, we will look at the German blogosphere, and see what it can tell us about the state of blogging in Germany.