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Juan J. Merelo / Fernando Tricas / Victor Ruiz / (Jose L. Orihuela)

Revisiting the Spanish blogosphere
We published our first paper on the Spanish blogosphere a year ago at BlogTalk. Since then, it has evolved to become something a bit different. For starters, its size has almost trebled. We have partial evidence
that the number of readers has also incresased. New waves of bloggers, and blog hosting sites have appeared, with some of them becoming quite popular; obviously, some previously well-known sites have gone into oblivion. At a high level, the spanish blogosphere is still connected, but some connectivity islands are evolving around highly-popular sites.
Depending on how you measure, it can be said now that the Spanish blogosphere follows a power law on the sites ranked by number of incoming links. It is not clear if that means that the Spanish blogosphere is yet mature, but it shows that, at least, some authorities are more clearly present than they where last year, and also that newcomers are filling some existing gaps. Popular topics have also changed and, in some way, its range has enriched. One of the most popular topic is still the blogosphere itself, but politics is also incredibly popular, followed, surprisingly, by science. In particular, some very highly focused topical weblogs have appeared and are gaining respect from the rest of bloggers. Several meta-blogging sites have also appeared, in an attempt to become the center of the blogosphere: sites that provide lists (even feeds) of updated weblogs, directories and collective sites. In our presentation we will try to measure their influence on the blogosphere or, at least, how they are seen by the blogosphere. The Spanish blogosphere still has a kind of love-hate relationship with traditional and digital media. While some newspapers and other traditional media have embraced blogging as a new form of journalism (even including weblogs inside their own sites), some still think it has anything to do with, or to fear from, them. Many journalists are blogging anyway, some of them trying to have direct experience with some excepticism, while others are almost adicts to publishing in this way. References to the Spanish blogosphere have started to appear in some traditional media, but others are still looking at the American alpha-bloggers when talking about the phenomenon.
Our plan is to provide an update on our previously published data about the Spanish blogosphere, showing the evolution of different measures presented last year, together with our impressions about this evolution.
We will also try to provide numbers to support the other ideas and feelings introduced in this presentation.

last update: Friday, July 23, 2004 at 10:32:36 AM-----------------------
Copyright 2004