Where have all the bloggers gone? Well, basically the places you would expect. Lots in Boston, lots in Austin, lots on the coast, and a surprising dispersal in Florida (?). This is, of course, a work in progress. I had hoped to get something together for the weblog ecosystem workshop next month at WWW, but didn’t quite make the deadline. (And didn’t find out until too late that the deadline had been pushed back a week!) Luckily, one of my advisees is more diligent and got in a preliminary piece of her dissertation. The paper looks at a procedure for estimating the location of a given blog.
The map here is based on a sample of a listing from the NITLE census, and looks only at blogs hosted by Livejournal and Diaryland. If I can update it to include self-owned domains (maybe sometime in the next couple of weeks), I’ll put that up too. Basically, the circles indicate the number of bloggers in each area defined by the first 3 digits of the zip code.
(Click for larger map. Disclaimer: IANAG.)
2 Comments
are you tracking blogging groups that use tools like meetup.org to coordinate? That would give you snapshots of people in certain areas. As well, only in the USA, eh? I guess no one else bloggs on the planet.
Well, we were going to include some of those Canadian states, but the post office told me we have acquired Canada yet. You know, I hear there’s oil and natural gas up there somewhere, so it’s just a matter of time.
Seriously, I’m not sure why we didn’t do North America. Going international in general would multiply the complexity significantly. E.g., we would need to find info on Canadian postal code Long/Lat centroids, population data, etc. I’m sure these are available, but it about doubles the work involved.
The problem with, e.g., tracking those who use meetup is that there isn’t any standard way to find it on the page. We’re trying to set up a process by which a program can take a pretty decent guess at where a blogger is. Livejournal and diaryland were the low-hanging fruit here: often with clear indications of the bloggers local.
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