Looking at the Blogosphere Topology through Different Lenses

Xiaolin Shi, Belle Tseng and Lada Adamic

The blogosphere is a vast and dynamic complex network. Any examination of the structure of such a network is dependent on the selection of blogs sampled and the time frame of the sample. By comparing two large blog datasets, we demonstrate that samples may differ significantly in their coverage but still show consistency in their aggregate network properties. We further compare the structure of a blog dataset with and without spam blogs, which account for a majority of the links in one sample. We also show that properties such as degree distributions and clustering coeffcients depend on the time frame over which the network is aggregated.

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