text:
This article is more than 1 year old
Twitter bug creates account hijacking peril
One-click vuln 'ridiculously easy to attack'
Twitter has been bitten by a hard-to-kill web-application bug that's being actively exploited to steal users' authentication credentials, a security expert said Tuesday.
A link that exploits the XSS, or cross-site scripting, vulnerability was included in tweets that sent users' session cookies to two servers under the control of attackers, according to Stefan Tanase, a security researcher for Russian anti-virus provider Kaspersky. The tweets, written in Brazilian Portuguese, claimed a popular band suffered a "tragic accident" and offered additional information.
The shortened link was clicked on more than 116,000 times, according to statistics from URL service bit.ly, although the actual number of people who fell for the attack is probably much smaller than that.
"We are currently working on taking down the malicious URLs and minimizing the damage as much as possible," Tanase wrote. "Twitter along with other significant industry peers have of course been notified."
He later updated the post to say that the vulnerability has been fixed.
Maybe, but at time of writing, Twitter was vulnerable to at least one other critical XSS hole that allowed attackers to steal authentication cookies with the simple click of a link. Mike Bailey, a web-application security expert with a firm called Mad Security, posted proof-of-concept code here. He told The Register the attack exploited a variation of the same bug Twitter supposedly fixed on Monday.
Sure enough, clicking the button caused our browser to tweet uncontrollably, but Bailey said the damage could have been much more extensive.
"I wrote this proof of concept in less than 10 minutes," he wrote. "These things are ridiculously easy to attack. While this demo requires interaction, it doesn't have to. The entire attack could just as easily be completely silent."
Bailey went on to say that his attack allows him to retrieve users' session cookies, which are sent once a correct password is entered.
To be sure, the attacks don't do much more than steal a cookie that allows an attacker access to a Twitter account for the remainder of the session, which is usually terminated when a user clicks the "sign out" link. Still, they're a reminder of the fragility of web security – and the uphill climb Twitter has if the site ever wants to become a trusted platform for its 105 million users. ®

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Likely controversial project is about slave trading Danish officer in the 1830s.
Award winning writer, editor and director Daniel Dencik, whose feature doc The Expedition To The End Of The World is the Closing Gala at CPH DOX in Copenhagen this weekend, is hatching his first dramatic feature.
The project, which he is also writing, promises to be highly controversial. Wulff (as it is currently called) will lift the lid on the illegal Danish involvement in the slave trade in the Nineteenth Century. The director is touting the project as a Danish period answer to Apocalypse Now or a riposte to Heart Of Darkness.
"No-one really knows it here. It's like a secret," Dencik commented of the Danish record in the slave trade and how it has been suppressed. "We're not taught it in school."
Dencik's script is based on his own original research at the Royal Library. He found letters from a young officer called Wulff who travelled to Danish Guinea in the 1830s to oversee the slave business. This was a period when Great Britain was already abolishing slavery.
"The Danish mentality is that we abolished slavery, that we are so good and that we are such a small country with Hans Christian Andersen," the director noted. "It is not true. We were one of the major players in slavery…Denmark has a wrong picture of itself. Denmark was a really big, important and hostile nation."
Dencik is currently applying to the Danish Film Institute for development funding for the film.
While working on his dramatic project, Dencik is also hatching a new documentary. This will be a portrait of Tal R, the leading Danish contemporary artist. The artist was part of the team on the three mast schooner sailing to North East Greenland for Expedition To The End Of The World. Sales agents are circling the doc, which is screening at CPH DOX as a work in progress prior to its likely official premiere at an international festival early in the New Year. The film is executive produced by Janus Metz (Armadillo) and produced by Michael Haslund-Christensen.
Here at CPH:DOX, the prolific Dencik is also presenting another feature doc, Moon Rider. Sold by Level K, this is a portrait of brilliant young Danish cyclist Rasmus Quaades.
Dencik, a published poet as well as a filmmaker and novelist, trained as an editor. His editing credits include Icelandic director Dagur Kari's Noi The Albino (2003) and Dark Horse (2005).


text:
A Victoria man dodged three charges relating to lack of insurance, not having a licence and passing on the left side of the road thanks to a scooter that a B.C. judge deemed to be a "mixed breed or mongrel," in a judgment posted on Monday.
When Terrance John Wojtkiw was pulled over on July 10 while heading northbound on the Patricia Bay Highway, he tried to explain to the officer how in the past four or five years that he's been driving the Tag 500 he's been stopped several times but always let go when officers realize it's a motor assisted cycle.
READ ALSO: Victoria student out $600 for lack of e-bike insurance blames confusing rules
The Crown called into question whether or not the scooter really was a motor assisted cycle due to modifications that had been made to the pedals, turning them 180 degrees. Wojtkiw testified he had made the adjustments because the downward arm would catch on the roadway while making turns.
Another factor that came into play during trial was the speed at which the scooter had been driving when the officer pulled Wojtkiw over. A motor assisted cycle must not be capable of assisting to a speed greater than 32 km/hr, Wojtkiw was noted to be travelling at 48 km/hr.
READ ALSO: Recent collision raises questions about rules of road for personal mobility devices
Wojtkiw presented evidence showing a slight decline at that section of the road that may have caused him to pick up speed.
The judge stated that the scooter met the statutory definition of a motor assisted cycle despite the fact that the device governing speed was either disabled or malfunctioned.
Because the scooter was deemed a motor assisted cycle, the operator is not required to have a valid motor vehicle liability policy nor a drivers licence, tossing out the first two charges. The third charge of passing on the left was also tossed out due to the fact that the law only pertains to vehicles, therefore excluding a motor assisted cycle.
The judge ended the hearing by suggesting the regulations would benefit from a review.
Follow us on Instagram Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.


text:
The powers that be in New York—Madison Avenue, Broadway, Anna Wintour—would have loved a Serena Williams–Maria Sharapova final at the U.S. Open. She of fashion design and sport's mightiest sisterhood against she of Russian glam and a namesake candy line.
But on Friday at Flushing Meadows, far away from Manhattan and the glamified hopes of a final-in-lights dream prizefight between the one-name superstars "Serena" and "Maria," Victoria Azarenka made sure that such a joust wouldn't take place.
Vika, as she's known in the tennis world, denied Sharapova in the day's first semifinal in a dramatic one-on-one drama between two shrieking, hard-hitting, tall-as-skyscrapers athletes that ended with Azarenka walking away the winner, 3–6, 6–2, 6–4.
So a Vika-Serena final is what will happen in Queens Saturday night, and will certainly be a show worth top billing for tennis—and for sports. Because, more than anything else, Serena and Maria's latest battles wouldn't have made for good entertainment, even off-off-off Broadway entertainment.
Playing in the Olympic final, Serena marched past the 25-year-old in decisive fashion, dropping just one game in a 6–0, 6–1 thrashing. Somehow, Azarenka's 6–1, 6–2 loss to Williams in the round before looked vastly closer, two games painting a completely different losing picture.
But feeding the hope that Serena and Vika could be a blockbuster is the fact that it has happened before. And the Belarussian has the tools that could possibly hurt Serena on court, sending back the shots that are decisively the hardest hit in women's tennis with interest, troubling the American in a way that no other woman on tour can do right now—not even Maria. In 2010, Vika led Serena by 6–4, 4–0 at the Australian Open, only to watch her lead slip away.
Azarenka is just 1–9 against Serena in 10 career meetings, but earlier this year they did battle on Centre Court at Wimbledon—the game's Shakespearean stage to New York's Woodstock-like Arthur Ashe Stadium—in a match that many considered the best of the year. There was Vika, just 23, banging the ball back with Serena, matching her grunt-for-grunt, stroke-for-stroke.
Something similar happened between them at last year's Open. It was the third round, and Azarenka and Williams met on the first weekend of the Open instead of the second, as the American was lower seeded and had encountered Vika earlier in the draw. Serena won, 6–1, 7–6 (5), but not before Ashe was electrified by the scrappy fighting back of Azarenka, who popped a lob volley over Serena's head late in the second-set tiebreaker and punctuated the winner with a "C'mon!" fist pump.
Azarenka is decidedly not a fan favorite, especially in New York. But that is just it—it's part of the theater of the match. Here is an athlete who insists on walking onto the court with her headphones cupped to her ears and her hoodie over her head, bobbing like a prizefighter before a big battle. She's told the press she dances backstage. What moves? She won't share.
Yet Serena is the one who has been dancing by opponents in droves this summer. First Wimbledon, then the Olympics. It is the American who has come back from a health scare—a pulmonary embolism last year—that has finally found her form more than 12 months after returning to the game.
For tennis, it is great that Serena is back, and it is great too that these women are meeting in the U.S. Open final, with the chance to build up a rivalry the game is missing. There are no more Martina-Chrissie or Monica-Steffi bouts to be had, not even the ongoing drama that was generated between Serena and Justine Henin, who retired in early 2011.
Azarenka presents that challenge for Serena because of what she can do in between the lines. She puts such power on the tennis ball, and she trumped Sharapova because of her sound movement. Vika scurries about the baseline with speed, soundly finding the ball in front of her hip and not catching it behind her body, like Sharapova does when she struggles, as so often happens when she faces Serena.
More than anything else, the Sharapova-Serena "rivalry" has run its course. Serena leads 9–2, but has won their last eight matches in a row. She has lost just nine games in their last three matches alone. It's like the Rockefellers taking on the owner of a corner deli in a land battle—they just aren't going to budge.
That is what Vika can do against Serena: move her. The world's No. 1 is happy to do so if she gets the chance. Serena has for so long fed off the notion that it is Williams against the world. But now, with an adoring American crowd behind her, that role has gone to Vika, clad in a black top with a neon yellow skirt for much of this tournament, a Gotham villain with a city to crush.
What tennis fans—and the sporting public—want in Saturday night's final is a fight, a blow-by-blow between two of tennis's best. That simply wasn't going to happen with Maria and Serena, glamorous though it would have been. So while Vika is a little rough around the edges, she can use the edges of the lines on court to rough up Serena, and that is the kind of battle—the kind of theater—that everyone wants to watch.


text:
KickStart - Trial & Error in the service of mass production
What is Kickstar? - Explaining what it is, and who needs it.
Kickstart HowTo. What's wrong? - How the howto looks, and how incorrect it is. - Trial & Error - The story.
Building our own Kickstart scripts correctly. Interactive demonstartion of how we build the right ks.cfg script.
What next? - Things we have left to do after the instllation is done.


text:
The Santa Monica City Attorney's Office reports there has been a surge of housing discrimination complaints by tenants or housing applicants seeking reasonable accommodations for their disabilities.
In the last five months, the Office's Consumer Protection Unit (CPU) received seven such complaints.
By comparison, the office received only three such complaints in Fiscal Year 2011-12.
The City of Santa Monica's CPU will host a new housing seminar April 29 in recognition of national Fair Housing Month that will focus on reasonable accommodation issues.
The CPU accepts complaints for housing discrimination based on race, religion, national origin, gender, disability, family status, sexual orientation, and age. However, disability-based fair housing complaints and inquiries usually exceed all other types.
Despite a range of difficult issues, the CPU manages to help the parties resolve most of these disputes without litigation–disputes such as the one that arose when Santa Monica tenant Zelda Alvarado was diagnosed with a serious respiratory disability.
Zelda lived in an apartment owned and managed by G & K Property Management.
The tenants in the units on two sides of her apartment were smokers.
Zelda could smell the smoke every day and night and began to feel worse.
Her doctor confirmed that this secondhand smoke coming into her unit exacerbated her respiratory disability.
Soon afterwards, Zelda learned of a vacancy in a smoke-free unit in her building.
She wrote to G & K, requesting that they transfer her to the smoke-free unit as an accommodation to her disability. She included a note from her doctor.
When G & K denied her request, Zelda filed a fair housing complaint with the CPU.
Diane Varady, an investigator with the City Attorney's Office, began working on the case.
"First, I talked with several staff members at G & K, which is a fairly large management company," said Varady, who is retiring in April after 34 years at City Hall. "They admitted the denial of Zelda's request, and they pointed to their wait-list system, saying that Zelda could not cut in line ahead of other tenants and applicants."
Varady discussed the case with Deputy City Attorney Gary Rhoades, and they considered the facts of Zelda's case in light of the fair housing laws requiring landlords and managers to make reasonable accommodations in their rules and policies so that tenants with disabilities have equal enjoyment of their units. Did Zelda's request for a smoke-free apartment qualify as a reasonable accommodation to G & K's wait-list rules?
There are two basic legal requirements for a reasonable accommodation.
First, the accommodation must be needed in response to the nature of the tenant's disability. The doctor's statement had confirmed that Zelda needed this accommodation. Second, the accommodation request must be reasonable. This means it does not cause an undue burden, either administrative or financial; small or modest burdens or costs for the owner are considered reasonable. As long as the accommodation first requested by the tenant is reasonable, the tenant may reject alternatives, such as the small air filter that G & K proposed.
Varady and Rhoades didn't see any evidence of an undue burden on G & K in allowing Zelda, a current tenant, to move into a vacant apartment.
Making exceptions to wait lists is a classic example of an accommodation needed to help disabled tenants get the apartments and amenities they need, whether it's a smoke-free unit, a unit with a ramp, or a parking spot that's accessible or near the unit.
So Varady requested a meeting at the property with G & K.
"The meeting Gary and I had with staff at the property was very productive," said Varady. "It came with a tour of the building and a brief meeting with the tenant. We discussed the fair housing law, Zelda's dire situation, and G & K's wait list rules."
"At that meeting," Rhoades added, "the staff began to see how broad and protective reasonable accommodations are supposed to be."
Two days later, Zelda called Varady to say that her request for the new vacant apartment had been approved and that she was moving that weekend.
"Zelda got her reasonable accommodation without having to resort to litigation," said Rhoades, "That's our goal every time."
The CPU has resolved seven fair housing cases in recent months. They include the following accommodations:
· Lockbox installation: A 91-year-old disabled tenant had twice fallen in her rented condominium unit, requiring break-ins by emergency responders. The tenant and Santa Monica Fire Department's request to install a lockbox with a unit key next to her front door was rejected by the homeowner's association. After a letter from and phone conversations with the CPU, the HOA voted again, this time to allow the lockbox.
· Service animal for child: The disabled child of a tenant required a service animal. The management company and owner had already rejected the tenant's request for a waiver of the building's no-pet policy and pet deposit requirement. The CPU wrote a letter and emails and persuaded the owner to allow the pet and to return the deposit.
· Emotional support animal: A tenant's request for an emotional support animal had been rejected based on the fact that the doctor's note supporting the request was not specific enough. The CPU persuaded the owner and owner's attorney that such medical requests did not have to name the disability or get into the specifics of how the animal would help.
· The burden of relocation to another unit: Numerous severely disabled persons using Section 8 vouchers were in deed-restricted units that were now suddenly subject to unaffordable rent increases and had been pressured by the owner to move to other buildings with units restricted to lower rents. The CPU and the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA) persuaded the housing provider to grant over twenty reasonable accommodation requests to delay the changes until the tenants left the units of their own accord.
· Caregivers for tenants: A tenant with severe disabilities needed a caregiver. She submitted a caregiver candidate to her landlord, but the landlord refused to respond and then threatened eviction if the caregiver moved in. The CPU stepped in and along with LAFLA and persuaded the owner and his attorney that if he failed to respond to a caregiver request within a reasonable timeframe, he would waive his right to object to the caregiver.
· Number of emotional support animals: A landlord with a no-pets building called the CPU. An applicant for one of her vacancies had two animals that he claimed were emotional support animals. The landlord was inclined to reject both under the mistaken belief that she only had to grant accommodations to in-place tenants. However, she soon agreed to consider the applicant with the animals and the applicant agreed to get separate medical letters for each animal.
The Consumer Protection Unit also resolved two housing discrimination matters involving family and religion:
· Religious accommodation: A Jewish family was interested in a new vacancy at a local apartment building. However, the open house for viewing apartments and getting applications was limited to certain evenings where the family's religion prohibited such trips. After the family's request for a religious accommodation was rejected, the CPU sent an email that persuaded the housing provider to extend new open-house times.
· Children playing in the common area: The owner and management of a large apartment building had banned children (and adults) from playing in the building's small courtyard. After the families filed a complaint with the CPU, the office persuaded the owner that this policy had a discriminatory impact on children and that it had in fact been implemented to keep children out of the courtyard. The policy was changed to reflect that most activities in the courtyard could resume.
The Consumer Protection Unit's seminar on fair housing and reasonable accommodations is set for April 29, 2013 from noon to 1:30 pm at the Santa Monica Main Library in its multi-purpose room on the second floor. Participants are invited to bring a brownbag lunch.
Visit the Consumer Protection Unit's website at www.smconsumer.org to register for the workshop or contact them at 310.458.8336.


text:
A to Z: Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA)
May also be called:JIA, Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, JRA
Arthritis is an inflammation of the joints that is characterized by swelling, heat, and pain. The most common form of juvenile (affecting children) arthritis is juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA).
More to Know
Causes of JIA are not known ("idiopathic" is a medical term used to describe a disease with no known cause). But experts believe it's an autoimmune disease (when the body's immune system isn't working correctly).
There are seven major types of JIA, and they usually affect kids and teens between 6 months and 16 years old. The first signs can include limping or a sore wrist, finger, or knee. Joints may suddenly swell and remain enlarged. Stiffness in the neck, hips, or other joints also can occur.
JIA is a chronic condition, meaning it can last for months and years. Sometimes the symptoms go away on their own (called remission). Remission may last for months, years, or a person's lifetime.
Keep in Mind
An early and accurate diagnosis is key to effectively managing JIA. Understanding the symptoms and characteristics of each type of JIA can help a person maintain an active, productive lifestyle.
Medications might be used for pain and inflammation or to aid the immune system, and physical therapy and exercise sometimes help. Rarely, a person might need surgery or corticosteroid injections.
All A to Z dictionary entries are regularly reviewed by KidsHealth medical experts.


text:
The 3vί Starlet Stroker is our latest innovative and intelligent product. The intelligent part is that vibration will be activated with motion of the device. The 3vί Starlet Stroker also features multiple suction settings, a realistic internal vaginal texture and the voice of CINDY STARFALL to help you get over the top!
Each device has 6 different voice tracks to help you live out your own unique fantasy. The 3vί Starlet Stroker also features USB Warming, a Hand-Free Base, and a Headphone port. No other Stroker on the market compares to the 3vί Starlet Stroker!
ORDER YOUR 3Vi STARLET STROKER TODAY!
3Vi Starlet Stroker is a rechargable product.
Unit includes standard USB charging cable, suction base, headphones, cleaning tube and instructions.
USB Wall Plug NOT INCLUDED.
For maintenance, we recommend using our Absorbing Wand.
Model: PPUSA-3Vi001
Material: TPE
Height: 3 in
Width: 3 in
Length: 11.4 in
Weight: 1.7 lbs


text:
Imagine a coin-tossing game. On each turn, players toss a fair coin 500 times. As they do so, they record all runs of heads, so that if they toss H T T H H H T H T T H H H H T T T, they will record: 1, 3, 1, 4, representing the number of heads in each run.
At the end of each round, each player computes the product of their runs-of-heads. The person with the highest product wins.
In addition, there is a House jackpot. Any person whose product exceeds 1060 wins the House jackpot.
There are 2500 possible runs of coin-tosses. However, I'm not sure exactly how many of that vast number of possible series would give a product exceeding 1060. However, if some bright mathematician can work it out for me, we can work out whether a series whose product exceeds 1060 has CSI. My ballpark estimate says it has.
That means, clearly, that if we randomly generate many series of 500 coin-tosses, it is exceedingly unlikely, in the history of the universe, that we will get a product that exceeds 1060.
However, starting with a randomly generated population of, say 100 series, I propose to subject them to random point mutations and natural selection, whereby I will cull the 50 series with the lowest products, and produce "offspring", with random point mutations from each of the survivors, and repeat this over many generations.
I've already reliably got to products exceeding 1058, but it's possible that I may have got stuck in a local maximum.
However, before I go further: would an ID proponent like to tell me whether, if I succeed in hitting the jackpot, I have satisfactorily refuted Dembski's case? And would a mathematician like to check the jackpot?
I've done it in MatLab, and will post the script below. Sorry I don't speak anything more geek-friendly than MatLab (well, a little Java, but MatLab is way easier for this).


text:
The blogosphere has played an instrumental role in the transition and the evolution of linking technologies and practices. This research traces and maps historical changes in the Dutch blogosphere and the interconnections between blogs, which — traditionally considered — turn a set of blogs into a blogosphere. This paper will discuss the definition of the blogosphere by asking who the actors are which make up the blogosphere through its interconnections. This research aims to repurpose the Wayback Machine so as to trace and map transitions in linking technologies and practices in the blogosphere over time by means of digital methods and custom software. We are then able to create yearly network visualizations of the historical Dutch blogosphere (1999–2009). This approach allows us to study the emergence and decline of blog platforms and social media platforms within the blogosphere and it also allows us to investigate local blog cultures.Contents
Characterizing Dutch blogs: Where do bloggers blog?
Reconstructing the blogosphere
Defining the actors
The Dutch blogosphere in transition
Concluding discussion
The blogosphere has played an instrumental role in the transition and evolution of linking technologies and practices, such as the introduction and development of the trackback, pingback and RSS and their use by bloggers to develop a culture of blogging as a distinct online culture. Important research in this area has been practice, event or issue based, trying to capture an otherwise fleeting phenomenon in realtime, before it is deleted, overwritten or no longer available. Now that the blogosphere has reached maturity, the first historical accounts are being created. This study seeks to contribute to this body of literature by investigating the blogosphere's more structural platform and software infrastructure. More specifically, we seek to contribute to the empirical research of the national blogosphere by proposing new methods to explore transitions in the historical Dutch blogosphere. In addition, we will consider the implications of these methods when thinking about transitions in blogs and the local blogosphere.
Working from method, our contribution will be theoretical, as choices in method shape the definition of blogs and the blogosphere. This paper addresses methodological questions related to the empirical research of the national historical blogosphere, and present the outcome of preliminary research into the Dutch blogosphere [1]. The proposed approach combines techniques that are also used by search engines and Web archive crawlers — to discover and analyze the content of the entire Web — with editorial techniques commonly used in humanities and social sciences. While preliminary, the research both acts as a proof of concept and as a model for studying national and historical blogospheres, and provides new insights into the shape of the Dutch blogosphere and its interconnections.
The blogosphere is often studied by mapping and visualizing the interconnections between blogs, in order to make the blogosphere tangible and visible. In other words, to become visible, the image of the blogosphere must be constructed, either by blogosphere related services such as directories, Web rings and blog search or by academic network visualizations. By means of similar techniques such as contemporary blog related services, network visualizations may be constructed by employing RSS feed–crawlers to fetch the content — current and newly updated blog posts and their links — of blogs using their feeds (Bross, et al., 2010) or by using Web crawlers for network analysis. Crawling and network analysis may be used for widely varying analytical purposes, such as the IssueCrawler for issue network analysis to track conversation patterns in the blogosphere (Bruns, 2007); crawling the front page of blogs to reflect blogroll communities (Adamic and Glance, 2005); and, large scale grouping of linked blogs to define clusters of shared informational worlds (Kelly and Etling, 2008). Although different tools and methods produce different network visualizations, they all provide graphical representations of interconnections and insights into the overall structure of the blogosphere and its actors (Highfield, 2009). We uphold that choices in method do not only shape the blogosphere but also shape the definition of blogosphere and blogs.
Historical blogosphere research mainly consists of ethnographic research, providing personal stories and anecdotes (Blood, 2004; Rosenberg, 2009), in addition to empirical work, such as Michael Stevenson's (2010) research on the early A–list blogosphere, Rudolf Ammann's (2009) research project on the birth of the blogosphere and Ravi Kumar, et al. (2004) researching the structure and evolution of LiveJournal blog space. Kumar, et al. suggest a method based on time stamps — in addition to other features such as those present in profile pages — to map a blog space over time. More generally, the Internet Archive allows the study of previous states of the Web by providing time–stamped snapshots. Although the single–site history is preferred — as only single URLs can be retrieved — Internet Archive data may be used in a variety of ways. Ammann studies the emerging blogosphere by mapping linking patterns of early blogs on the basis of the Internet Archive and Stevenson outlines a method to re–purpose the Internet Archive to create a custom archive by using the early blog index EatonWeb as a historical resource to recreate the blogosphere. Our research builds on the above–mentioned methods and tools and has developed a number of novel techniques and methods.
First of all we will investigate the historical blogosphere by making snapshots of the Dutch blogosphere with specific attention to actor definitions and interlinking practices by introducing fine–grained URL and source code analysis. After that we seek to widen the historical blogosphere analysis beyond the Anglo–American context by specifically focusing on the Dutch blogosphere. A contribution to the definition of a "national blogosphere" is proposed by investigating the Dutch character of top level domain, blog software and platform use. Finally, we aim to contribute to hyperlink network and issue network analysis research by redefining what is considered an actor in the blogosphere.
Characterizing Dutch blogs: Where do bloggers blog?
How to formally define the nationality of an online site? The Web archiving community often tried to answer this question with locative technical indicators such as the IP address or top level domain (TLD). Indicators for location on the Web, however, are always ambiguous and their usefulness highly depends on the purpose and application. For the purpose of saving digital heritage for future posterity, the Dutch Web archiving institution formulated three defining characteristics, including language, TLD, and subject matter "aimed at the Netherlands" which is rather difficult to automate (Weltevrede, 2009). When defining a Dutch blog in this research project, in first instance we rely on authoritative sources, with their selection criteria for including blogs in their lists. In a second step, the question: "what is a Dutch blog?" evolves into "where do Dutch bloggers blog?" in order to enrich and refine the understanding of the location of Web content.
The collection of blogs in our corpus is retrieved from a 2001 database dump — containing 631 unique blogs — from Loglijst, an early Dutch blogosphere indexing initiative. In addition, we compiled expert lists from interviews, books and authoritative lists found on the Web and in the Internet Archive. These experts lists include long list nominations for the Dutch blog awards, the Dutch Bloggies from 2001–2008, all blogs mentioned in two seminal pieces on the history of the Dutch blogosphere by Dutch blogosphere historians Frank Schaap (2005) and Frank Meeuwsen (2010) and finally a list citing "Weblogs that really matter" in a December 2010 blog post by Bert Brussen, blogger for the famous Dutch 'shocklog' Geenstijl [2]. Relying on these sources to provide us with a collection of Dutch blogs led us to include a small number of Belgian (Dutch language) blogs that our sources considered to be part of the Dutch blogosphere [3].
We queried the Internet Archive's new Wayback Machine for each blog's URL and selected the result dated closest to the middle of each year under investigation. From the 2,500 URLs requested we were able to retrieve just under 1,000 blogs from the Internet Archive. This method yielded a collection of archived copies of historical Dutch blogs for each year with a timestamp near the middle of the year. Only blogs with a copy in the Internet Archive were retained for further analysis. The following table represents the number of blogs per year serving as starting points:
Table 1: Starting points retrieved from the Internet Archive per year. 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 24 138 456 816 778 863 850 788 717 860 723
Blog software features have previously been studied in relation to popularity and the success of Weblogs (Du and Wagner, 2006) and in relation to blogging practices which enable or restrict certain actions (Schmidt, 2007). In addition, we wanted to interrogate our starting points to look into the question 'where' bloggers blog by analyzing the TLDs, platforms and the software used. As far as we know this question has so far been understudied and, if at all addressed, the demographics of bloggers have been analyzed, such as the location provided in user profiles of blog platforms (Kumar, et al., 2004). This information, however, is optional and limited to some platforms only. Our study focuses on online culture — national digital culture — investigating a further specificity in Dutch online practice, i.e., software and platform usage as well as applications that persist, despite Twitter, Technorati and other dominant services from the U.S. When describing Dutch blogging practices we therefore pay specific attention to 'where' Dutch bloggers blog. In this study the question of 'where' is three–fold and includes the analysis of TLDs, platforms and self–hosted blog software.
TLD analysis
The top level domain (TLD) analysis presented here is part of a larger series of URL analysis methods discussed in this paper. As a first step we counted the TLDs of our starting points per year by entering URLs in batches corresponding to a single year using the TLD Count tool [4]. Figure 1 shows the relative distribution of TLD usage over time. The Dutch blogs in our collection favor the .nl domain over all other domains throughout the years. Moreover, a significant increase in the .nl domain becomes apparent, whereas the .com domain is steadily losing share over time; the results in the next section show that Dutch bloggers move away from .com blogging platforms such as Blogger's Blogspot to go to Dutch .nl blogging platforms.
The Dutch .nl domain is one of the top five country code top level domains (ccTLDs) in the world [5], which is also reflected in the Dutch blogs. It is however remarkable that the .nl domain has been dominant from the beginning, since the .nl domain only became available to private individuals since 2003. As a forerunner, since 2000, individuals were allowed to register third–level domains such as jansen.123.nl [6] but these domains were rather rare and are absent from our collection of blogs. As stated before, the Dutch blog collection contains a number of .be blogs, steady from 2000 onwards. Furthermore, 2002 presents a peak of .tk. Dot.tk "Renaming the Internet" offers free domain names and includes URL redirection and forwarding services. Lastly, a number of domains is unconventionally used for "commercial or vanity" purposes, including .nu (country code for Niue), marketed as 'now' in Dutch and .is (country code for Iceland), which is used as the verb 'to be' [7].
Figure 1: Relative distribution of Top Level Domains (TLDs) in the Dutch blogs over time.
Platform analysis
A second way to answer the question 'Where do bloggers blog?', complementing the TLD analysis, is by visualizing the variety and proportion of blog platforms used in the Dutch blogosphere. This requires basic background knowledge of blog platforms. With the use of Google Refine, "a power tool for working with messy data" [8] we 'coded' each of the blog platforms in GREL (Google Refine Expression Language) to automatically search, transform and count the platforms in our set of URLs. The results are presented in Figure 2, a custom made visualization combining the blog platform analysis with the self–hosted software analysis as discussed in the next section.
The graph shows the rise and popularity of Blogger's platform, Blogspot, in the beginning of 2000. The decline of Blogspot coincides with the rise of the Web–Log.nl blogging platform, and other Dutch blog platforms such as BlogNL, Blogo, Blogse, Punt and Blogeiland. Figure 2 clearly shows how from 2004–2005 onwards Dutch bloggers — except for a relatively small number of Blogspot and WordPress.com users — shift to Dutch platforms, which are orange color–coded. Only a few bloggers remain on legacy platforms such as Pitas, which no longer accept new members but are still functional for old members.
Dutch software and platforms play an important role in the Dutch blogosphere and between 2004 and 2009 over 40 percent of all bloggers use Dutch blog software or Dutch blog platforms. When zooming into the use of platforms only, in 2009 almost all bloggers on blog platforms make use of Dutch platforms (see Figure 3) [9].
Figure 2: Relative distribution of self–hosted blog software & blog platforms in Dutch blogs.
Figure 3: The relative amount of Dutch blog platforms over time compared to other blog platforms.
Self–hosted software analysis
URLs were analyzed to investigate the distribution of TLDs and platforms used in the Dutch blogosphere. The outcome suggests that the early Dutch bloggers did not use blog platforms. In general, they preferred to manually create their blogs, written in HTML or they used specifically designed self–hosted blog software. In HTML, the reverse–chronology, which is considered to be a key characteristic of blogs (Blood, 2004; boyd, 2006), had to be manually enforced in order to place the latest blog post on top. In order to include these kinds of blogs in our analysis we developed a method going beyond the blog's URL. We searched within the page's source code to look for the URL referencing the software powering the blog to create an accurate list of blog software.
Initially, the list was compiled by analyzing maps (see Section 4) and then refined with newly discovered blog software throughout the research project. To compile the list of self–hosting software, we used the reflexivity of bloggers. Typically, bloggers tend to analyze and describe the practice of blogging (Hourihan, 2002; Blood, 2002). When researching our initial list of software, we found blog posts comparing or mentioning different types of software (for an example, see Figure 4). For each year we searched the source code of the collection of archived blog front pages for the presence of the blog software types with the Source Code Search tool [10]. The results were editorially checked to establish whether the reference to the software implied that the blog was indeed running on it. Especially in the beginning, references to self–hosted blog software were not standardized. In later years the 'powered by' button in the side bar or footer became standard for most self–hosting software.
Figure 4: "Not tonight love/I'm busy playing around with Weblog software".
Contrary to the blog platform counts, the self–hosted blog software results suggest that the Dutch blog software Pivot/PivotX has been powering Dutch blogs from the start; it appears to have been the most frequently used software in the heydays of Dutch blogging. The decline of Blogger, the first blog platform used by Dutch bloggers, coincides with the rise of Blogspot — Blogger's platform. Furthermore, the bar graph shows a boost of blogs powered by WordPress.org in the blogosphere from 2006 onwards. Movable Type and the Belgian Nucleus have a small but loyal share of bloggers running the software.
In terms of blog software and blog platforms, the peak of Dutch blogs was around 2005 for platforms and 2006 for software. Notably, the share of self–hosted software exceeds one–click publishing platforms, which even the bloggers themselves had not expected. A number of posts from early bloggers express fear that soon everybody will be blogging; some others voice rivalry between self–hosting bloggers and platform bloggers (for an example, see Figure 5). A next step in further developing this methodology is to formalize the various types of references to software, throughout the years, and design queries to automate the collection and analysis process of the results.
Figure 5: Early Dutch blogger about the rise of free blog platforms [11].
In this first part we focused on designing methods to address the question 'Where bloggers blog?' in order to enrich current methods determining the nationality of blogs by complementing a TLD analysis with a platform and software analysis. In the following part we will look into the interconnections between these blogs and propose a method to create historical blogospheres.
Reconstructing the blogosphere
In 1999, Brad L. Graham coined the term 'blogosphere' to mark the end of cyberspace: "Goodbye, cyberspace! Hello, blogiverse! Blogosphere? Blogmos?" (1999); William Quick revived the word in 2001 as "the intellectual cyberspace we bloggers occupy", explicitly mentioning that the blogosphere is a space for serious discourse. Echoing the idea of the blogosphere as a discursive space "the imagined public sphere" (boyd, 2006) was presented alongside the idea of blogs as a reaction to mainstream media (Lovink, 2008). Besides the notion of the blogosphere as a space for discourse, other definitions stress the formalistic characteristics of the blogosphere as an interlinked set of blogs which "allows for the networked, decentralised, distributed discussion and deliberation on a wide range of topics" (Bruns, et al., 2009). A complimentary approach to the blogosphere as an interlinked set of blogs looks at how blogs are "embedded into a much bigger picture: a segmented and independent public that dynamically evolves and functions according to its own rules and with ever–changing protagonists, a network also known as the 'blogosphere'" (Bross, et al., 2010). Following this line of thinking, i.e., blogs which are embedded in a larger networked ecology with shifting protagonists, the blogosphere may also be defined by including the actors they link to in their networked ecology: "The notion of a mini–blogsphere additionally rests on the extent to which the set of blogs doing an issue are interconnected by links and/or by textual referencing. Blogs also make [sic] be 'connected' together through common references to a third party, e.g., all blogs linking to or referencing a particular piece in the New York Times" (Rogers, 2005). Although these two dominant approaches to research the blogosphere have different objects of research, they do not exclude each other, as demonstrated by Benkler and Shaw's (2010) U.S. political blogosphere research.
Although highly formal, the blogosphere has more of a cultural than a technical meaning, because as illustrated in the previous section, the many different blog platforms and software types permit the blog's custom use. At first glance our approach might appear formalistic, because the definition of the blogosphere follows from the outlined method based on link analysis, see below. However, by mapping the formal changes in linking patterns and URLs over time, we can propose results about specific local cultures of use.
The annual blogospheres were created from a collection of blogs retrieved from the Internet Archive by means of custom tools. One of the consequences of studying transition with the Internet Archive is that only research on front–page level and not on a post level is possible. Hence this method may be viewed as a more structural 'blogosphere' analysis instead of an 'issue' or 'event' analysis. Although fully aware that our choice of starting points shapes the Dutch blogosphere, the methodology used only retains blogs deemed relevant by other blogs. It is a co–link analysis as used by the IssueCrawler [12]. This co–link analysis is performed in two steps: first, for each blog all links on front–page level are extracted (one depth) and subsequently, in Gephi, only nodes receiving at least two links from the starting points are maintained in the network visualization (one iteration). The resulting network map thus retains only co–linked actors, those receiving at least two links from the starting points. This implies that the starting points themselves might drop off the map and that Dutch blogs, which are not available in the Internet Archive, might reappear in the network. It thus also acts as a validation of our expert lists.
Whereas the co–link analysis is an analysis module most successful for locating issue networks, in our case, the result of the co–link analysis is that issue or event–based links are excluded from analysis. This has three main reasons. First, the starting points are not chosen because they share an issue or an interest in an event, but rather the practice of blogging in the Dutch Web space. Second, only front–pages are crawled, which means that the more structural links are followed, such as links in blog rolls, and links to blog related services and blog software. In other words, these links are the stable variable in the analysis, whereas links in posts are only taken into account if present on the front–page. Third, the time frame of each network is one year. Combined with the previous point, that links from posts are only crawled one level deep, it results in links to versatile issues dominating the Dutch blogosphere for a short period of time being excluded, only the more structural issues prevailing. When studying a structural blogosphere blogs are assumed to be embedded in a larger networked ecology created by bloggers through their linking practices, including other actors than blogs, such as blog portals, Web rings, news Web sites and social media platforms.
In what follows, we will further describe how we constructed the Dutch blogosphere on the basis of the Internet Archive and prepared it for further analysis. Specific attention will be paid to the construction process by reconfiguring actor definitions and reconsidering interlinking practices. This approach gives us novel insights into the composition of the blogosphere and its actors. We have further developed methods to study transitions in the historical blogosphere with the Internet Archive. Our method consists of two strands: first we refine the network analysis by defining the actors using Gephi and G–Atlas software [13], and then we complement the network analysis by color–coding the platforms present in the blogosphere.
As previously described, we retrieved snapshots of our blogs from 1999 to 2009 from the Internet Archive, extracting their outlinks on a front–page level and putting the results in Gephi's GEXF format. In Gephi, a simplified version of IssueCrawler's co–link analysis is performed so that only blogs with more than two links from our starting list are retained. Co–link is performed on a 'by site' level, as it is more indulgent than the 'by page' option because it counts all links from site to site. In other words, co–link analysis is performed on the hosts and not on the deep pages.
A common problem in online network visualizations is that big platform nodes take a prominent position in the graph. Analysis of these maps often suggests that the debate is moving elsewhere (i.e., to social media). In an attempt to untangle the big platform nodes in the Dutch blogosphere, we propose to redefine the nodes of the network to actors. Most network analysis software treats the host and in some cases sub–host as the actor. However, in our case the 'actor' or blogger is often defined after the slash, like the early bloggers that started blogging from their personal homepage or the recent microbloggers on Twitter. A similar approach is being developed by Medialab Science Po who have defined the concept of 'Web entities' to unravel pages grouped by domain name (Girard, 2011). Also Benkler and Shaw (2010), in their work on the U.S. political blogosphere, stress the importance to analyze what is inside the large network nodes in order to specify their internal differences.
To identify nodes in the blogosphere as actors, we redefined 'actors' on a URL level. This did require an additional analysis step because not all URLs follow the same pattern. With most Web sites 'actor' equals 'host' (e.g., example.com) while actors on blog software usually are defined before the host on a subdomain (e.g., example.blogger.com), actors on personal homepages are often defined by their ~ after the slash (e.g., xs4all.nl/~example) just like microbloggers on Twitter (e.g., twitter.com/example). In the actor definition project we sought to formalize 'URL patterns' in the network.
The Dutch blogosphere in transition
Mapping the outlinks of the blogs we retrieved from the Internet Archive from 1999 until 2009 allows us to go back in time and study how and where the Dutch blogosphere originated. Using the fine–grained actor definition, the network is visualized with Gephi for each year. Figure 6 shows the rise, evolution and first signs of decline of the Dutch blogosphere, grey depicting the hyperlink network of all years together and red the blogosphere of a particular year. The first Dutch bloggers starting mid 1999 were not interlinked into a 'sphere', so we can trace back the beginning of a structural Dutch blogosphere to 2000.
Figure 6: The Dutch blogosphere in transition.
In 1999 the map (not displayed) only shows four nodes, not linking to each other but present because they receive at least two links from our selected starting points. The four nodes are Nedstat, Nedstatbasic, Wired and a Dutch blog by Wessel Zweers, a.k.a. ~wzweers. A familiar node on the map is Wired, a technology magazine also prominent in the American early blogosphere. The only Dutch blogger on the map is hosted on one of the oldest Dutch hosting services providing free personal homepages, "De Digitale Stad" (DDS, Digital City). Well–known Dutch blogs from that period, like Sikkema, Prolific and Alt0169 are notably absent because they do not receive two links from our starting list's blogs. Figure 7 shows that some of the well–known Dutch bloggers, as mentioned in Meeuwsen (2010), together with less well–known bloggers, are present but do not form a blogosphere yet. Most notably Alt0169, ~wzweers and ~onnoz reach out to other Dutch blogs and may be seen as an effort to establish a community between blogs. Exemplary are links to blogs that list blogs, like http://beboo.org/metalog, listing the top 50 (international) blogs.
Figure 7: The pre–blogosphere in 1999. Early blogs linking outward.
Cluster analysis over time
In 2000 the Dutch blogosphere is dominated for the first time (see Figure 8) by bloggers on personal homepage providers (blue) and student pages (pink). The right side of the blogosphere shows a cluster of Dutch homepages (~) and student homepages. The free homepage provider DDS and Dutch Internet service provider XS4ALL are the most prominent providers. The larger nodes in the center are the founding blogs of the Dutch blogosphere, such as Alt0169, Sikkema, S-lr, Smoel, Rikmulder, Tonie, Prolific, Pjoe, Stronk, Ben Bender, Vandenb, Retecool. They are actually a closely linked cluster. Alt0169.com, a heavy linker in 1999 but without receiving any links back, is a central node in 2000. Figure 9 shows the Dutch marketing cluster, which emerged in 2005 and still a very dominant cluster in the Dutch blogosphere. Another distinct cluster in the later blogosphere is the Blog.nl cluster. Blog.nl has a very distinct shape because all Blog.nl blogs list and link the other blogs on that platform as can be seen on the right in Figure 11.
Figure 8: The Dutch blogosphere in 2000. Note: Blue: personal homepages; Pink: student pages; Yellow: blog platforms.
Figure 9: The Dutch marketing cluster in 2005. Note: Marketing blogs marked in pink.
By means of the same method for coding blog platforms for our platform analysis we created several categories in order to trace specific transitions in the Dutch blogosphere by coding them in Google Refine: Homepages, University Homepages, Blog Related Services, Platforms, Social Media Platforms, Statistics. The categorization was created through expert URL reading and iteratively complemented with new findings throughout the project. This categorization allows us to color actors belonging to a specific category in Gephi making it easier to locate actors and track changes over time. This method allows us, as we will demonstrate below, to look at the role of blog related services and social media in the blogosphere over time.
Blog related software: Statistics
The newly defined blogosphere includes a variety of blog–related actors. The blogosphere does not only take shape by the interconnections between the blogs but also by the interconnections between the blogs and other actors, such as links to external (blog) services and links to the blog software homepages. Blog related services include portals, manual and automatic blog indexers, external comment services and statistics providers.
One of the most prominent nodes since 1999 has been Nedstat, the Dutch statistics provider. Nedstat — and its basic/free service Nedstatbasic — is a Dutch service providing statistics for Web masters and bloggers about their visitors and has been present in the blogosphere together with other statistics providers. Most bloggers publish their statistics, which supports the claim that "the blogosphere is obsessed with measuring, counting, and feeding" (Lovink, 2008). Zooming into the node (see Figure 10) shows us all linked bloggers, hence presumably using Nedstat as their statistics provider.
Figure 10: Links to Nedstat.
Social media analysis
The early blogosphere is characterized by larger nodes such as Alt0169, Sikkema, ~wzweers, the founding fathers of the Dutch blogosphere. The heydays of the Dutch blogosphere are characterized by the rise of specific clusters, such as the marketing cluster and the blog platform cluster of Blog.nl, and by the rise of blog related services such as statistics. The later period is characterized by social media, the widgetized self and content links. In this social media research project, we aimed at developing methods to analyze more closely the practices between blogs and social media.
Schaap (2005) empirically researched what he calls "the dichotomous nature of the Dutch blogosphere" caused by the clear divide between two distinct types of Weblog forms: the linklog and the lifelog. In addition, we propose to include the 'platformlog' as a third type of blog with particular characteristics. Whereas lifelogs primarily post about their daily life in a diary style and in most cases only link to their about page, their off–line contexts and other bloggers, the linklogs link abundantly to other blogs and media in their role of pointing out the best of the Web (Schaap, 2005). The platformlog embeds and links content from social media platforms like Flickr, YouTube and Facebook and refers to the author's presence on these platforms in sidebar widgets. The platformlog is often used to present the widgetized self (Baym, 2007), or the distributed self across social media platforms (Helmond, 2010). Whereas in the mid and late 1990s the self was defined on the personal homepage and later on the blog, nowadays the self is also defined and performed on social networking sites and content platforms. Blog software popularized the creation of the widgetized self with its easy drag and drop widgets that allowed bloggers to easily embed content from their other platforms into their blog via the sidebar. The sidebar is no longer only used to link to other bloggers, using the blogroll, but also to link to the self on other platforms such as Last.fm for music, Flickr for photos and YouTube for videos. As our method collects outlinks from the front–page and subsequently performs a co–link analysis, the widgetized self in the sidebar on the front page can be captured as a new actor in the blogosphere. In traditional hyperlink analysis social media nodes are disproportionally large as all references are collapsed into one node.
Comparing the 2009 blogosphere with and without our custom actor definition (Figure 11), it becomes apparent that the social media platforms privilege a more fine–grained analysis. Social media are the big nodes in the network without actor definition; however, with actor definition the social media platforms seem to lose prominence in the blogosphere.
Figure 11: Big social media nodes. The 2009 blogosphere with and without actor definition. Note: Social media platform nodes are highlighted in magenta.
The question then arises what do people link to in social media: to user pages or to content (e.g., video, photo, status update)? Figure 12 shows the large social media platform nodes, containing smaller nodes. Comparing the various social media platforms, the results suggest that some platforms can be defined as 'media sharing' platforms, such as YouTube and Flickr, which mainly consist of embedded content links in blogs. In the blogosphere map with actor definition, these nodes decrease in size. Facebook is a relatively small node in the Dutch blogosphere and the links it receives dissolve into a divers set of profiles, pages, apps, events, and groups. Hyves — the Dutch social network that, arguably, still outnumbers Facebook in the Netherlands [14] — is one of the smallest social media references. Although the Dutch blogosphere prefers Dutch software and platforms, this is not reflected in social media platform links. Twitter, the largest node in the network is a platform mainly receiving links to user pages. This means that bloggers refer to themselves or to friends on the micro–blogging platform.
Figure 12: Social media in the 2009 Dutch blogosphere. A fine–grained URL analysis of the big social media nodes. References to social media platforms untangled.
Traditional link analysis has its limitations when analyzing the share of social media in blogosphere networks. Our study suggests that the uniform large platform nodes are misleading. We found that link analysis zooms out to look at platforms as a whole and treats the entire platform domain as the node; in doing so the individual content link and the individual author disappear. The platform nodes require a more nuanced exploration.
The results of our research indicate that the methods proposed for investigating the national historical blogosphere appear to be overall useful. This paper aimed to contribute to the growing body of literature on blogs and the blogosphere by proposing new methods to empirically investigate transitions in the historical blogosphere over time. Hence a method was developed and described to create a so–called structural blogosphere on the basis of the medium specific characteristics of the Internet Archive, allowing for the re–construction of a blogosphere on domain level and not on post level. The advantage of this method is that it allows for a 'structural' blogosphere analysis instead of an 'issue' or 'event' analysis. With a structural analysis software and platform analysis may be performed; in this case it was used as a new way to study the nationality of blogs. We sought to contribute to the 'where' question of Web content by asking "where do Dutch bloggers blog?" and looked into TLD, platform and software usage. Our study suggests that Dutch bloggers increasingly blog on in the .nl space despite the more general trend of software concentration and domination of actors like Blogger and WordPress.
This paper further developed three analytical techniques and methods to study the national historical blog blogosphere: URL analysis, source code analysis and hyperlink analysis. URLs are very rich sources of information often following a certain syntax, which makes them very suitable for analysis. Here we used URL analysis in two ways: TLD analysis and platform analysis. With source code analysis we contribute to the study of software in general and, more specifically, the study of national software. The method developed provides insight into the software powering a blogosphere. Further research may include a fine–grained feature analysis over time, placing special emphasis on collaborative and discursive features such as the comment, plugins and the permalink. Our contribution to link analysis considers ways to treat the large platform nodes in network visualizations. We propose two methods, the first being an actor definition and the second a fine–grained social media analysis. Whereas traditionally the host is considered to be the actor, when dealing with platforms the actor, or blogger in this case, is often defined after the slash. By detecting URL patterns, new actor definitions may be implemented before co–link analysis. Fine–grained social media analysis is similar in technique, but instead of only looking for actors, it is aimed at distinguishing actor and content links. The analysis is performed after co–link analysis.
Future research might cover in how far blog–native software features such as the permalink, trackback or RSS feed contributed to the construction of the early blogosphere and its subsequent transitions; in other words, how do changing linking practices relate to new features introduced by blog software? We would also like to further develop our hyperlink analysis by looking into different types of hyperlinks, beyond the <a href> link here retrieved from the front pages, and by distinguishing between 'traditional' hyperlinks, embed codes and social buttons and plugins in a hyperlink analysis [15].
Additionally, we also like to further explore the definition and circumscription of national blogospheres by enriching our research with content analysis, with a special interest in language transitions in the Dutch blogosphere. Content clusters do not only arise from linking practices but may also be defined through their common language. Moreover, the Dutch blogosphere may be analyzed on the basis of 'Web words' used, choosing the most distinctive and significant ones as points of departure, like Retecool's jargon or the specific language used by GeenStijl; two leading Dutch blogs.
About the authors
Anne Helmond is a Ph.D. candidate with the Digital Methods Initiative, the New Media Ph.D. program at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. In her research she focuses on software–engine relations in the blogosphere and cross-syndication politics in social media. She also teaches new media courses in the Media Studies Department.
E–mail: anne [at] digitalmethods [dot] netEsther Weltevrede is a Ph.D. candidate with the Digital Methods Initiative, the New Media Ph.D. program at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, where she also teaches. Esther's research interests include national Web studies as well as platform and engine politics. Additionally Esther has been coordinating the DMI Summer schools and is also a member of Govcom.org, a foundation dedicated to creating political Web tools.
E–mail: esther [at] digitalmethods [dot] net
We would like to express our sincere thanks to Erik Borra for developing custom tools, discussing methods and probing sharp questions, Mathieu Jacomy for his help with creating Gephi maps and giving access to the G–Atlas tool for analyzing maps and Jan–Willem Hiddink and Robert–Reinder Nederhoed for providing a database dump from "Loglijst". Last, but not least, we would like to thank Marguerite Lely and Anneke Agema for their editorial advice.
1. The project page of this empirical research including data, tools and visualizations is located at http://dutchblogosphere.digitalmethods.net.
2. http://www.dejaap.nl/2010/12/28/verplicht-in-uw-rss-reader-Weblogs-die-er-echt-toe-doen/, accessed 1 September 2011.
3. Belgium borders the Netherlands and the two countries share a common language: Dutch (Flemish).
4. The TLD Count tool is located at: http://tools.digitalmethods.net/beta/tldCounts/.
5. http://www.sidn.nl/fileadmin/docs/PDF-files_NL/SIDN_Jaarverslag_2010.pdf, accessed 1 September 2011.
6.. https://www.sidn.nl/nieuws/nieuwsbericht/article/sidn-kondigt-uitfasering-persoonsdomeinnamen-aan/, accessed 1 September 2011.
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#Commercial_and_vanity_use, accessed 2 February 2012.
8. Google Refine is located at http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/, accessed 1 September 2011.
9. In 1999, none of the blogs were located on blog platforms because the first platforms were introduced around this time. For example, Pitas (later known as Blogger) was created in July 1999 and Diaryland in September 1999 (Helmond, 2008).
10. The tool can be found at http://tools.digitalmethods.net/beta/sourceCodeSearch.
11. Translation: "Ah, the free blog services. How we, the bloggers of the first hour, with our own domain and a self–made site, despised them, the services that allowed you to put up a blog in a few clicks. Look at him, he has a blogspot, or worse, a web–log.nl, which we scornfully called a web–dash–log."
12. A software tool locating and visualizing networks on the Web, at http://issuecrawler.net.
13. Gephi is open source software for visualizing and analyzing large networks graphs, located at http://gephi.org, and the G–Atlas software is developed by TIC Migrations in Paris, located at http://ticmigrations.fr/.
14. http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/4/The_Netherlands_Ranks_number_one_Worldwide_in_Penetration_for_Twitter_and_LinkedIn, accessed 1 September 2011.
15. Some of these ideas are currently being implemented in the Tracker tracker tool, developed by the Digital Methods Initiative. The tool is located at http://tools.digitalmethods.net/beta/trackerTracker.
Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance, 2005. "The political blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. election: Divided they blog," LinkKDD '05: Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Link Discovery, pp. 1–16, at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1134277, accessed 1 February 2012.
Rudolf Ammann, 2009. "Blogosphere 1998: Analysis," at http://tawawa.org/ark/2009/11/5/blogosphere-1998-analysis.html, accessed 1 September 2011.
Nancy Baym, 2007. "The widgetized self," at http://www.onlinefandom.com/archives/the-widgetized-self/, accessed 2 February 2012.
Yochai Benkler and Aaron Shaw, 2010. "A tale of two blogospheres: Discursive practices on the left and right," Berkman Center for Internet and Society Working Paper Series, at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2010/Tale_Two_Blogospheres_Discursive_Practices_Left_Right, accessed 2 February 2012.
Rebecca Blood, 2004. "How blogging software reshapes the online community," Communications of the ACM, volume 47, number 12, pp. 53–55.http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1035134.1035165
Rebecca Blood, 2002. "Weblogs: A history and perspective," In: John Rodzvilla (editor). We've got blog: How Weblogs are changing our culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus.
danah boyd, 2006. "A blogger's blog: Exploring the definition of a medium," Reconstruction, volume 6, number 4, at http://reconstruction.eserver.org/064/boyd.shtml, accessed 1 September 2011.
Justus Bross, Matthias Quasthoff, Philipp Berger, Patrick Hennig and Christoph Meinel, 2010. "Mapping the blogosphere with rss–feeds," Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (Perth, Western Australia), pp. 453–460.
Axel Bruns, 2007. "Methodologies for mapping the political blogosphere: An exploration using the IssueCrawler research tool," First Monday, volume 12, number 5, at http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1834/1718, accessed 1 September 2011.
Axel Bruns, Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai, 2009. "Mapping the Australian political blogosphere," Proceedings of the WebSci'09, at http://snurb.info/files/WebSci%20Poster.pdf, accessed 2 February 2012.
Helen S. Du and Christian Wagner, 2006. "Weblog success: Exploring the role of technology," International Journal of Human–Computer Studies, volume 64, number 9, pp. 789–798.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2006.04.002
Paul Girard, 2011. "HyperText Corpus Initiative: How to help researchers sieving the web?" Proposal for the "Using Web Archives" panel, Out of the Box Conference (9 May), at http://www.medialab.sciences-po.fr/publications/Girard-HCI.pdf, accessed 1 February 2012.
Brad L Graham, 1999. "Friday, September 10, 1999," at http://www.bradlands.com/weblog/comments/september_10_1999, accessed 1 September 2011.
Anne Helmond, 2010. "Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software," paper presented at the DMI mini–conference at the University of Amsterdam (20–22 January), at http://www.annehelmond.nl/2010/01/21/essay-on-identity-2-0-constructing-identity-with-cultural-software/, accessed 2 February 2012.
Anne Helmond, 2008. "Blogging for engines. blogs under the influence of software-engine relations," M.A thesis, University of Amsterdam, at http://www.annehelmond.nl/wordpress/wp-content/uploads//2008/09/helmond_mathesis.pdf, accessed 2 February 2012.Timothy Highfield, 2009. "Which way up? Reading and drawing maps of the blogosphere," Ejournalist, volume 9, number 1, pp. 99–114.
Meg Hourihan, 2002. "What we're doing when we blog," at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/06/13/megnut.html, accessed 1 September 2011.
John Kelly and Bruce Etling, 2008. "Mapping Iran's online public: Politics and culture in the Persian blogosphere," Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Research Publication, number 2008–01, at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2008/Mapping_Irans_Online_Public, accessed 1 February 2012.
Ravi Kumar, Jasmine Novak, Prabhakar Raghavan and Andrew Tomkins, 2004. "Structure and evolution of blogspace." Communications of the ACM, volume 47, number 12, pp. 35–39.http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1035134.1035162
Geert Lovink, 2008. Zero comments: Blogging and critical Internet culture. New York: Routledge.
Frank Meeuwsen, 2010, Bloghelden. Utrecht: LeV.
William Quick, 2002. "Tuesday, January 01, 2002," at http://www.dailypundit.com/backupcreateblogoarchiveposts/backup000229.php, accessed 1 September 2011.
Scott Rosenberg, 2009. Say everything: How blogging began, what it's becoming, and why it matters. New York: Crown.
Richard Rogers, 2005. "Old and new media: Competition and political space," Theory & Event, volume 8, number 2, at http://www.govcom.org/publications/full_list/rogers_old_new_media.html, accessed 2 February 2012.
Frank Schaap, 2005. "Links, lives, logs: Presentation in the Dutch blogosphere," In: Laura Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff and Jessica Reyman (editors). Into the blogosphere: Rhetoric, community and culture of Weblogs, at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/, accessed 1 September 2011.
Jan Schmidt, 2007. "Blogging practices: An analytical framework," Journal of Computer–Mediated Communication, volume 12, number 4, at http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/schmidt.html, accessed 2 February 2012.
Michael Stevenson, 2010. "The archived blogosphere: Exploring Web historical methods using the Internet Archive," paper presented at Digital Methods mini–conference, University of Amsterdam (January); see http://www.annehelmond.nl/2010/01/20/dmi-mini-conference-day-1-michael-stevenson-on-the-archived-blogosphere/, accessed 2 February 2012.
Esther Weltevrede, 2009. "Thinking nationally with the Web: A medium–specific approach to the national turn in Web archiving," M.A thesis, University of Amsterdam, at https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/pub/Dmi/DmiSummer09/weltevrede_national_webs.pdf, accessed 2 February 2012.
Editorial history
Received 20 September 2011; accepted 23 January 2012.
"Where do bloggers blog? Platform transitions within the historical Dutch blogosphere" by Esther Weltevrede and Anne Helmond is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.Where do bloggers blog? Platform transitions within the historical Dutch blogosphere
by Esther Weltevrede and Anne Helmond
First Monday, Volume 17, Number 2 - 6 February 2012