For everyone attending (in the flesh or via Twitter and other means) the PDF Europe, here’s linkfluence’s presentation about the European political web, its structure and dynamics, and the level of interest of different national political communities for the designation of the first President of the European Council. More explanations and details coming today as an update to this post…
UPDATE & DETAILS (21/11/09)
Let’s get to the bottom of things, shall we.
First, what exactly is included in the map of the Eurosphere. Inside each of the spheres included in this preliminary piece of research (which rests on the analysis of 4 European countries, namely France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands and a specific European-affairs sphere), there are communities of political bloggers and portals (i.e. communities whose members are affiliated to a given party or clearly advocating a political platform, represented in shades of blue), communities of journalists and experts (shades of green), communities of political pundits commenting on public issues without a clear or distinctive party line (under the label “opinion”, shades of red), media websites (shades of orange), trade unions (shades of purple), think tanks (light blue), institutions (websites of public bodies or international organisations, brown), NGOs and activists (grey).
Second, how do we explore and segment the social web and build maps of online communities in general, and of the political Eurosphere in particular. According to theories and concepts drawn from sociology and the social graph field (see this research paper we published at ESOMAR for a lot more details), we use proprietary web crawlers and algorithms to reveal clusters of websites (blogs, social networks, forums, etc.) that flock together and form true communities whose members listen to and influence one another, mainly around their shared topics of interest (politics in a broad sense for the Eurosphere). The distance between websites (in a given community) and between communities (on a given map like the Eurosphere) simply reveal the density of their interactions. The closer they are, the more they engage each other (or engage the same websites around them, meaning that two websites or two communities may not engage each other but may interact with pretty much the same websites around them), the further away they are, the less they engage each other in conversations. We base ourselves on these concepts to draw conclusions as to the dynamics of the social web and the Eurosphere in particular.
Finally, we also conduct opinion research by way of monitoring all the public conversations happening inside the communities we have mapped. This is how we are able to measure quantitatively and analyse qualitatively different items of perception, interest or judgement.
All the findings of our preliminary piece of research (which will be updated in the coming months) can be found in the PDF file below. Here’s a summary:
[...] Map & Analysis of the European political web Source : http://us.linkfluence.net/blog/2009/11/20/first-map-of-the-eurosphere/ [...]
Thanks, this looks really great! Does this mean you will be doing a review of the eurosphere on a regular basis?
[...] Anthony Hamelle di Linkfluence è arrivato uno studio molto interessante sulla “eurosfera”, la nuvola di contenuti e link del continente, per il momento [...]
[...] selezionato di 10 mila siti politici in Francia, Germania, Italia e Olanda. Il risultato dell’indagine, realizzata da linkfluence, azienda specializzata in ricerche di mercato sui media sociali, è una [...]
[...] mange forskere. Linkfluence har sin egen tilnærming, og presenterer nå det de kaller det første kartet over europasfæren. Se presentasjon med mer fiks grafikk nedenfor. Her er hovedpunktene — merk poenget med [...]
Will it be possible to look at this map more in detail?
As a euroblogger and scientist I am very much interested in social network analysis and information flows in the European Union, so it would be really interesting to take a closer look at individual actors and more structural details in on the map.
@Taco
Thank you. The map and the accompanying research will be updated regularly indeed, with the addition of further countries and renewed analyses.
@Julien
We will publish a sampled version of our map on our website. Actually the one we showed at the PDF was already a representative sample, containing around 2,800 websites, of a larger database of 10,000 websites. The map we will publish online will most certainly contain fewer than 1,000 websites. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more information (and please be patient as we are going to substantially update our website first).
[...] through the presentation itself (with audio available from the PDFEU streaming site), and also the accompanying linkfluence blog post. There’s more information to come, obviously, but a few findings are already particularly [...]
[...] Euroblogosphere (or “Eurosphere“) is a microcosm of the EU. We have to “broaden” the number of bloggers as we [...]
Cool affair, I didn’t thought it was going to be so awesome when I read your title!
[...] articolo di Beppe Granieri “La blogosfera molle” che cita e commenta una relazione di Anthony Hamelle di Linkfluence che riguardo alla blogosfera d’Italia scrive come «appaia molto isolata, rinchiusa in se [...]
[...] posts here and here. You might also be interested in Linkfluence’s first map of the European blogosphere and a study published about the Euroblogosphere by the University of Hamburg. Finally, you might [...]