Mapping the political blogosphere

Why is this a good map of the political blogosphere?

I’ve seen these kinds of things for years, and it seems to me that they really suck as maps. There’s no respect for detail, the scales seem picked at random, and I don’t know what the directions even mean. A geographic map should help me to go from place A to place B – this map seems as unhelpful in that respect as Pollack’s Blue Poles painting. The abstract expressionists didn’t call what they were doing maps, and neither should these wild graph-ers who come up with these illustrations. I would entitle this one: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Isn’t that really a picture of V’Ger from Star Trek: The Motion Picture?

I’m not crazy about this infographic:

1) the colour = community key strikes me as subjective/limiting: what constitutes “independence?” How privative are these categories in practice?
2) left-right position in the graphic carries a strong implication, especially with the yellow category being placed between the blue and red, for all that the “map key” asserts that it’s meaningless.
3) what is the penumbra, or ‘halo’ in the background supposed to connote? (I can say it doesn’t denote anything, because it’s not mentioned in the “map key” at all)
4) I’m not sure what “infopit” means.
5) Apparently The tools and the contents we provide should satisfy your private interest for politics. Hm. Is that a normative statement about the tools, or about my private interest? Exactly why “private?”
6) The more links a node receives from other nodes shown on the map, the bigger it appears on the map.
OK, so it’s a measure of how often the site receives links. But:
Note that the link count is based solely upon links coming from nodes on the map. Links coming from websites located outside of the map are excluded.
The map shows only the 270 or so most frequently-linked sites from a set of over 2000 sites. No data are given on how those 2000 sites were selected – so there’s a lot of room for researcher’s bias, here, compounded by the sort of procedural idiocy to which maps and colograms are prone. See Mark Monmonnier: How to Lie with Maps.
Based on this approach, we can determine the level of authority attributed to a given site within these communities. This statement strikes me as deeply unsafe.

Still, it’s pretty.

What’s the difference between purple (Roll Call and Factchuck) and yellow?

Ah, those are the only two “independent” as opposed to “infopit” sites.

For people interested in the display of information, they could have put the informative sidebar stuff (the pie chart and key to communities) above the search gizmos, so you wouldn’t have to scroll down for them.

Of course there would be a problem with people who use one nym when commenting here, and another nym to contribute to Sadly, No (for instance).

Oh, that seldom happens.

Matt, it’s got a pie chart and a key!?

It’s even worse than I thought.