One-mode directed network of links between US political blogs (Adamic and Glance 2005)

This network consists of the blogosphere around the time of the 2004 US presidential election until February 2005. The 2004 election was the first in which blogging played a significant role. Ties were constructed from a crawl of the front page of each blog.

Political leaning is indicated as "Liberal" (or left leaning) or "Conservative" (or right leaning), sourced from blog directories. Some blogs were labelled manually, based on incoming and outgoing links and posts.

data(irps_blogs)

Format

#> -- # US political blogosphere circa 2004 ---------------------------------------
#> # A labelled, complex, directed network of 1490 blogs and 19090 link arcs (130
#> parallel)
#>
#> -- Nodes
#> # A tibble: 1,490 x 3
#>   label                      Leaning Source
#>   <chr>                      <chr>   <chr>
#> 1 100monkeystyping.com       Liberal Blogarama
#> 2 12thharmonic.com/wordpress Liberal BlogCatalog
#> 3 40ozblog.blogspot.com      Liberal Blogarama,BlogCatalog
#> 4 4lina.tblog.com            Liberal Blogarama
#> 5 750volts.blogspot.com      Liberal Blogarama
#> 6 95theses.blogspot.com      Liberal Blogarama
#> # i 1,484 more rows
#>
#> -- Ties
#> # A tibble: 19,090 x 2
#>    from    to
#>   <int> <int>
#> 1   267  1394
#> 2   267   483
#> 3   267  1051
#> 4   904  1479
#> 5   904   919
#> 6   904  1045
#> # i 19,084 more rows
#>

Details

Adamic and Glance gathered the blog URLs from the eTalkingHead, BlogCatalog, CampaignLine, and Blogarama directories, which the 'Source' nodal attribute records. They retrieved a single front page for each blog on 8 February 2005, added the blogs those pages cited 17 or more times, and retrieved a front page for each of those on 22 February 2005. Libertarian, independent, and moderate blogs were not gathered.

A tie is any link from one blog's front page to another's, whether it appeared in a post or in the blogroll in the sidebar, and the two are not distinguished.

Note that 65 of the 19090 arcs repeat an arc already in the network, with nothing recorded to tell the two apart, so tie_is_parallel() marks 130 ties and as_matrix() reports two rather than one in those cells.

References

Adamic, Lada, and Natalie Glance. 2005. "The political blogosphere and the 2004 US Election: Divided they blog". LinkKDD '05: Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Link discovery, 36-43. doi:10.1145/1134271.1134277