New Article from BROG

The folks over at BROG (Blog Research on Genre) have a new essay out that I've been meaning to post about for a few days now called "Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis 'From the Bottom Up.'" The abstract:

The "blogosphere" has been claimed to be a densely interconnected
conversation, with bloggers linking to other
bloggers, referring to them in their entries, and posting
comments on each other's blogs. Most such characterizations
have privileged a subset of popular blogs, known as
the 'A-list.' This study empirically investigates the extent
to which, and in what patterns, blogs are interconnected,
taking as its point of departure randomly-selected blogs.
Quantitative social network analysis, visualization of link
patterns, and qualitative analysis of references and
comments in pairs of reciprocally-linked blogs show that
A-list blogs are overrepresented and central in the
network, although other groupings of blogs are more
densely interconnected. At the same time, a majority of
blogs link sparsely or not at all to other blogs in the sample,
suggesting that the blogosphere is partially interconnected
and sporadically conversational.

And research questions:

1) How interlinked is the blogosphere from the perspective
of a random blog?

1a) Which blogs are central?

1b) Which blogs are more interconnected? Are
there cliques?

1c) Is the blogosphere a "small world"?

2) Do other types of "conversation" take place between
linked blogs, and if so, to what extent?

To put it another way (if I understand them correctly) could any random blog on Blogger (nice that they've turned the whole system into one big blog ring instead of putting those ads at the top) potentially lead to this blog right here, given many degrees of separation, of course? Worth a look.