Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Courtesy Joseph Duemer is this interesting visual guide to blogging "neighborhoods". (It's Java-driven; I had to download a plug-in to make it work.) It purports to visually show one which blogs are related to one's own, if I understand things correctly. I'm not sure how this thing works. When I plug in my own URL, a group of left-leaning political blogs are returned and shown as being in "my neighborhood", along with Instapundit. That struck me as a bit odd: while I make no secret of the fact that I am pretty much on the liberal side of things, my political focus is not a primary (or secondary, or tertiary, or quarternary) concern of mine here. I would have expected to see some more blogs of the literary variety show up, but I suspect these things are decided by which blogs link mine, and the ones out there that permalink me are all liberals. (Just why Instapundit shows up is a mystery to me, as I've never noticed any traffic in my referrals as coming from him -- and I suspect that if it happened, I'd notice. I still remember the spike I received a couple of months ago when something I wrote in response to an SDB post earned one of those "Jaquandor comments" updates of his.)

Nevertheless, it's quite fascinating to plug in several blogs at once and note the interconnections. Just noodling around, I created a fairly large map of liberal blogs and conservative blogs (yes, not everyone fits into those labels as conveniently as others, but it was just a momentary exercise) and as I did so, I couldn't help but notice the density of connections on each side of the map contrasted with the sparsity of connections between the two sides. I'm not sure if this indicates anything special about the current political landscape or not -- if so, it would require more rigorous research than me sitting here over morning coffee clicking stuff and saying, "Hey, cool!" -- but it still struck me as interesting. Kind of a graphical picture of the "echo-chamber" phenomenon.

And it was really cool to be able to visualize Byzantium's Shores, with its 45 hits or so a day, as the center of the blogging universe. Nothing like a little graphical egoboo to start the day!

("Egoboo" -- there's another ugly word. Are the poets of the future going to be able to create beautiful poetry with the ugly words we keep coining these days?)