Social scientists, hoping to explore the uncharted terrain of human behavior in cyberspace, are mapping online interactions by studying blogs, according to “Human Trails In Cyberspace“, an article in this week’s edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education (although it doesn’t right now, this article may soon require a subscription to access).

Among the researchers are Lada Adamic, an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who created a map of ties among political bloggers, and Matthew Hurst, director of science and innovation for Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a company that helps businesses track and analyze trends in consumer-generated media (i.e., blogs, online forums, and newsgroups).

You can download the article Adamic co-authored, “Expressing Social Relationships on the Blog through Links and Comments” (in PDF), on her web site. To see Hurst’s project, visit his blog, Data Mining, for more information and to see his visual representations of the complex strands of connection among blogs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 10:17 am and is filed under Blogs and Bloggers, Mind and Cognition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.