Sparklines. Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media. UK Government Writes Twitter Guide...in 20 Pages. Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media: The Mo. Current systems for ranking blogs are largely about inlinks.
Technorati and BlogPulse both use this basic measure of citation to create their lists; TechMeme - whose new list created plenty of discussion on the topic - takes the algorithm it uses for placing stories on its home page (essentially, another citation based approach) and aggregates visibility information. Additional features to consider include the number of feed subscribers and the number of visitors to the blog site. However, there are plenty of alternative approaches to creating a list of important blogs. The above approaches are motivated by some (vague) notion of influence - a term that is central to the analysis of social media and blogs in particular, but one which has not really been given a full, well grounded definition in the space.
Echelon. January 21, 2007 - 17 comments Update: I created a tool to convert CSV files to Walrus compatible LibSea files.
Check out walruscvs here You can find additional social network visualizations here.