TTLB, Open TrackBacks, and Social Network Analysis
Effective immediately, The Truth Laid Bear will no longer included trackbacks from Open Track Back parties in the TTLB Ecosystem rankings. I posted my thoughts on the matter in the comments section of his post on this matter. I have extended and amplified my reply below and have included images::
Speaking as someone who made use of Open Trackbacks and who also provides them once per week, I have no problem whatsoever with your decision. I see it both as a fair one and, even if unfair, well within your rights to implement. For anyone who has paid attention, it is not hard to see how the Open trackback phenomenon runs counter to the intent of the TTLB Ecosystem. Thus, I understand your motivations and respect them. I also recognize why other's do not or are disappointed with your decision.
Speaking as someone actively engaged in empirical research on blogs I see several important research questions here, all of which require empirical investigation. As you may be aware, there is a tremendous amount of research and theory in the area of social network analysis that cries out for application to the blogosphere. This is especially so for that research that examines the network structure of links, i.e. not the number so much as the position and function of certain nodes within networks. Let me provide a practical example to make this last point clear.
Imagine a simple "ring" network comprised of six blogs where one of them is linked only to its immediate neighbors, as below:
Now imagine another where every blog is linked not only to its neighbors, but to every other blog in the network. This is what is often called a "clique":
Next, picture a situation where one blog is in the center and that it is linked to all others but those others are linked only the center. I'll call this the "Hub-and-Spoke."
As you can well see, the number of links per blog does differ in these three archetypal structures. That number does not, however, give provide a very good picture of structure of the links and what it might be saying about the importance of any particular blog relative to others who have linked to it. To my mind, network structure, i.e. the way in which blogs are linked, is just as important a measure of a blog's influence, if not more so, than the sheer number of those links.
Why does this matter? I have heard several complaints, some even in the comments to your post on Open TrackBacks, that the top blogs are more self referential, i.e. that they operate like the clique network described above. My hypothesis is that while top blogs surely reference each other frequently, there are not, by definition, enough top blogs to account for all the traffic and links they get. In other words, if they are only linking to each other, they wouldn't have as many links as they do. My guess is that they resemble the Hub-and-Spoke structure more than the Clique. This is an empirical question, however, and one that can only be answered accurately by someone willing to expend the time, effort, and money to gather and analyze the data. Fortunately, my job as an academic allows for me to undertake just such a thing.
Another question that could be investigated is whether and how different are the link structures of various blogging communities, e.g. sports, political, gossip, etc. In my BlogAds revenue analysis I found that the number of weekly page views was a much, much better predictor of ad revenue than was the number of links. I also found that left-of-center blogs earned far more money, even when controlling for traffic, than did right-of-center blogs.
One thing that might explain this difference is the structure of the links in each group. In other words, the manner in which one community of bloggers links to others could be explain which is relatively more profitable. My hypothesis is that the the left and right side of the blogosphere have quite different links structures. In particular, it seems to me that the former is more centralized, i.e. has more of a Hub-and-Spoke structure than does then latter. Again, this is an empirical question that I plan to pursue in the very near term. It would be a truly valuable service to the blogosphere and the academic research community if TTLB could find a way to make the raw data for these kinds of analyses available. I suspect that I ask for too much, however.
Per the usual, I welcome any feedback any readers have on this question. And of course, I welcome trackbacks to this post, too! ;-)
Happy Thanksgiving!
Linked at: The Political Teen; Bacon Bits; Choose Life; Right on the Right; Is It Just Me? The Conservative Cat and Don Surber and Adam's Blog.