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Blogosphere mapped

A great java applet discovered tonight (via Mike Whybark) that maps out the “blogosphere” and connects the links so to speak between all the blogs out there (well, not all of the blogs, but a lot of them). The applet allows you to enter in various blogs and get a general sense of how many other blogs point to that one, and vice-versa, that is how many outgoing links a particular blog might have.

Off the top of my head I entered in andrewsullivan.com, and true to a recent posting at Tres Producers, there were a lot of links pointing towards Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, but no lines indicating any links out from said blog.

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Sullivan and Co. have more company

Glad to read that Eric Alterman, a left-leaning pundit I remember from long-ago McNeil-Lehrer NewsHours and other places — in fact I think it was Alterman who introduced me to the term pundit around the time his first “punditocracy” book came out — now has a blog on MSNBC.com called “Altercation”. Just a couple of days old at this moment but promises to be an interesting read. Not surpringly, yesterday’s first entry deals with blogging itself. I note that Alterman has an editor (or team of editors) for his blog, and is a bit embarrassed by that, and somewhat defensive about it too. Alterman is also apparrently a major Springsteen freak (he published a book on him last year). In his obligatory “links” section, which Alterman admits is still being worked on, the usual suspects (Cursor, Romenesko, Drudge, etc.) appear, and smack-dab in the middle of those is “Springsteen Archive“.

Naturally, while some are pleased at Alterman’s entry into blog land, others are predictably thumbing their noses.

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Another bloggin’ article

The Guardian has added to the recent spate of articles on “the blog” and what it all means for 21st century journalism, by Ben Hammersley, a blogger himself (naturally). I like the tagline for the article:

Investigating the world of weblogs: at a Silicon Valley conference, new technology left old-style reporters so far behind that they retired to the bar

I don’t know about you, but personally I’d rather go for the hotel bar martini than real-time blogging on my laptop….

This quote, related to Japan’s cellphones, from Dan Gillmor, amused me:

Some day soon, there will be a major, newsworthy event in Japan and there will be 400 photos taken of it in the first minute by cam-equipped cellphones. Those 400 photos will make their way to news organisations and to individuals and we will have 400 visual perspectives of that event from the ‘former audience’.