How News Travels on the Internet

I think you give me too much credit. I only get a fraction of the traffic of someone like Instapundit.

It’s an entertaining chart. However, while it’s true that those dashed lines are rarely attributed, you seem to be implying that that is a bad thing. Well, I’m one of the (apparently many) people who think, “who cares?”

Suppose I pass along a link to a new web page to my readers, because I think it’s funny, or clever, or whatever. What’s the important information here? It’s the link itself. Who gives a rat’s ass how I found it? Of what possible consequence is it to anyone that I found it from BoingBoing who found it from Memepool who found it from Slashdot who found it from Anonymous Coward who got it in email? The ultimate web page itself is the only attribution that matters. If you were writing a bibliography, that whole chain of discovery wouldn’t go in it: only the primary sources. Documenting only the last link in the chain is only good for ego gratification of people who (like me) waste most their day dredging the net. The first link in the chain is the one that is the actual creative act.

Stephen, your graph definitely makes it easier to see the flow of information from source to blogs to media outlets and so on. But what I found interesting about the Blog Epidemic Analyzer and the related research at HP Labs was that they had come up with a way to infer where information came from even when there was no attribution. (See, the point is not that people are “stealing” info when they don’t provide attribution, but rather that it’s much more difficult to track the flow of ideas when there are no explicit links back to the source.) Sounds like your visualization technique and HP Labs’s inference technology could be a good complement. (I authored the Wired News piece.)

Screw the article, look at the robot in the suit in the upper right corner and read the accompaning text. That is great!

I’d actually say Livejournal is mostly Dark Matter. The rebloggability of purely personal rants isn’t that huge, and the friends-only features of Livejournal means that a lot of it can’t even be read by the public.

you’ve reached the indexing stage… you’re on blogdex…

C’mon, this is a post Einstein world, you got to have Time in there somewhere. Adding that dimension would also highlight what is the interesting aspect of this phenomenon, which is how long and what kind of stories “bubble up” to the mainstream. Tracking exposure at each level (perhaps correlated to volume of viewers for the circular size of each “site” and thickness of lines connecting them representing directed traffic) and how long it takes a story to go from obscure to front page.

Oh, and mixing trackbacks and comments is muy muy confusing. Kinda kills any chance for meaningful discussion.

My comments from DoWire: http://www.dowire.org

A good diagram at:
http://stephenvandyke.com/2004/03/08/how-news-travels-on-the-internet/

I think it inflates the value of blogs versus the “dark matter” of which private e-mail networks among friends have the most power (IMHO). I would say however, that the national/global? level key blogs are much more visible and therefore have gained more credibility from folks making TV- related news decisions. In terms of local online agenda setting, I’ve only heard a few accounts about critical mass local blogging.

When I first discovered the New York Times as a small town teen, I remember being amazed that what was “new and big” in that paper ended up on the national television news that night (until then I thought TV led the way like most people today believe). Most Americans read wire copy a day later on national news item in their smaller daily newspapers. Now blogs are moving into the agenda-setting territory with a direct line to cable news channels and the Sunday morning talk shows.

Also, for quick links to all the “nice” things folks are saying in “dark matter,” see the bottom right links:
http://www.e-democracy.org/us/2004/president/bush.html
http://www.e-democracy.org/us/2004/president/kerry.html Also:
http://www.e-democracy.org/us/discussion.html
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bush2004/messages
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Kerry_for_President/messages

Steven Clift
Democracies Online
http://www.dowire.org

Stephen: Why was my Drudge comment deleted? Was it not a valid point?

The very first sentence of this article contains a typo (“though” instead of “thought”).

Although there are some passing references to RSS in the comments, the graphic doesn’t do RSS/Atom justice in how news travels around the ‘net. My $0.02.

Tattoo shirts, blog-news, and filthy origami

It’s awesome that somebody -almost nobody- like me can write a comments here. : )

Oh how the mighty have fallen. There’s two huge “networks” out there you don’t even list. They’re low-tech, all text-based, and older than the Internet… but they’ve been travelling over the Internet for the past 15 or so years, and with the Internet underneath them they’re probably the fastest communication channels of all.

One, you kind of touch on, when you talk about email on “dark matter”. But mailing lists are still a lot bigger and more pervasive than person-person email, and a lot of them are not all that dark. There are mailing list archives going back to the late ’70s.

The other is about as un-dark as you can get, and thanks to Google it’s eminently trackable from the web… and that’s Usenet. This goes back almost as far as mailing lists and it’s far better archived, cross-referenced, and like mailing lists it’s “push” technology: it reaches out and touches people rather than waiting for them to come and find it.

Axons becoming dendrites or tendrils – this comes in from one of my screenagers from National Geographic (10/03) “The Glow-in-the-Dark Brain” by Joel Achenbach. Article states that the questions raised “will likely take years of research to answer.” Should they begin blogging about Stephen’s infographic with enthusiasm? Early response looks good…still working on the body-state-metaphor as well.

Cool, I have a high-school student from Taiwan staying with us and I will show him this. Just in case you have not seen this “Summary of How Blogs Work in 7 Easy Pieces” at http://www.streamlinewebco.com/blog/_archives/2004/3/23/28903.html
Still working, am I, on the body-state-metaphor… http://www.xanga.com/clophadeshotel