Mapping Ratata: Who’s Hot?

I wanted to play around in Gephi a bit more after my previous post about visualizing my social network on Facebook. So for my second project I turned my eyes to Ratata, a Swedish blog community in Finland with just over 1200 bloggers. A friend of mine, Poppe (also on Ratata), has been talking about analyzing the Swedish blogosphere. I hope he doesn’t mind me “borrowing” the idea.

I have almost no prior programming experience, but for some time now I have been trying to learn more about screen scraping. Guided mostly by the Dan Nguyen’s brilliant tutorial on coding for journalist I have started to know my way around Ruby. Scraper wiki also provides good guidance for those of us who still mostly do copy-paste programming.

After two days of trial and error I managed to put together a script that extracts all the links to fellow Ratata blogs from all the 1207 blogs. That gave me a data set of almost 2000 connections (due to some technical issues I had to exclude a couple of blogs). I obviously wanted to find out who is most popular. That is, who gets the most in-links? This is the result (click for full scale pdf):

The size depends on the number of in-links. Karin, one of the founders of the blog community, is maybe not to surprisingly number one with 70 other Ratata bloggers linking to her, followed by Mysfabon (43) and Kisimyran (37).
You’ll also notice that the gap between the haves and the have-nots is big when comes to links. The core of the map is surrounded by a cloud of unconnected blogs (and shattered dreams of blogger fame perhaps?).

I’ve uploaded the Gephi file if you want to take a closer look at the dataset yourself.

Here is the complete top ten: