by Judith Curry
Here’s something that should prove entertaining for a Sunday.
Paige Brown Jarreau has performed a very interesting survey among science bloggers. She has published a fascinating network analysis of science blogs [here]; the survey asked every blogger to list three other regularly read science blogs. The more incoming links, the bigger the dot and name. The links do no show in which direction the link runs. The smallest print is for blogs that participated, but have no incoming links.
Victor Venema has done a blog post with the climate segment of the blogosphere (click on the diagram to blow up):
The title of Victor Venema’s blog is Blog network analysis: WUWT & Co isolated from science. Excerpts:
Emphasized by the automatic coloring scheme is the splendid yellow isolation of WUWT & Co. If there would be no link between WUWT and the Climate Lab Book, they would have no link to science whatsoever. This network analysis could be used to determine who is eligible for a bloggie in the category science.
On the other hand, the purple climate and geo sciences cluster is clearly well embedded in the scientific community. The blogs Climate Etc. and Klimazwiebel often talk about building bridges to the mitigation sceptics. Maybe they should put a bit more emphasis on building bridges to the scientific community. (And I sometimes wonder why they do not want to build bridges to alarmist activists as well.)
JC comments
I responded to this survey, but did not list any blogs that I read regularly (you can see the ones that I read from my blog roll). Paige advertised this primarily on twitter as far as I can tell, so bloggers who are not active on twitter wouldn’t have spotted this. Further, you would have to be somehow connected to Paige’s extended twitter network to have noticed this.
A number things struck me about this diagram. First, the relative ‘size’ of the blog names (related to the number of times mentioned); this does not relate very well to blog traffic in terms of readership, where WUWT has several orders of magnitude more readers than any other blog on the list.
The second thing that struck me was the left vs right hand side of the diagram. All Models are Wrong (Tamsin Edwards), Climate Lab Book (Ed Hawkins), Climate Etc. and Klimazwiebel are relegated to the left hand side of the diagram, along with Climate Audit, WUWT, and Bishop Hill. On the right hand side, the only blogs by practicing climate scientists (at least that I can identify) are RealClimate, Variable Variability (Venema) and James Empty Blog (James Annan). Although there are a number I have never heard of that might be written by practicing climate scientists (e.g. Glacier Hub)
And Venema thinks the right hand side of the diagram represents ‘science’? With HotWhopper, Greg Laden, ThinkProgress, Rabett Run, DeepClimate? Ouch.
Lots of interesting blogs not mentioned here, e.g. SOD.
It would be interesting for someone to do an analysis of the climate blogosphere in terms of blogs that other blogs actually link to in posts, and also blog rolls of individual blogs. ATTP and HotWhopper (among others) link to Climate Etc. very frequently.
In any event, something entertaining to discuss during the holidays.
Filed under: Communication
