Mapping the political blogosphere

The online campaigns in the US presidential election 2008 gain momentum every day and with them the political comments by citizens on Web2.0 websites. There is for example a huge number of political bloggers who comment on the candidates, discuss issues and try to make their mark on the elections. One of the problems of the wide variety of voices in this discussion is that it is nearly impossible to get an overview about it. PresidentialWatch08.com tries to encounter this problem by visualisation.

The websites uses a technology provided by Linkfluence which allows drawing a map of hundreds of political blogs, their interaction and their alignment without making the overview to complicated. The interface allows selecting different parts of the political blogosphere and getting one-click information about all the blogs shown. The most interesting things may by that this kind of visualisation allows us to understand the complex interaction going on in the blogosphere at any given point of time.

It may be interesting to discuss where such a visualisation could also be used to understand deliberative processes in the web and to harness the knowledge created in these processes.

Tags: blogsphere, Flash, Presidential Elections, US, Visualisation