That should be relatively easy to do. Right now the exhibits for blogs and posts includes a list of everything that they link out to. There’s also the Link Friends Exhibit, which gives a list of all the URLs that more than one person has linked to, along with info about who linked to it.

The trickier thing that I’d like to get at is a “Good Neighbors” exhibit, which I think will move closer to what you’re getting at. This would pull out pairs (maybe groups) of blogs such that one or more post within one of the pair links to one or more post in the other blog. Pulling that data together is relatively straightforward — the trickier part has been figuring out how to display it in a readable way.

Patrick

The export I used for the digitalworlds graph was just the wordpress export of the Digital Worlds blog, that I then parsed and scraped.
The ORO author network was generated by screen scraping author names, but the repositroy has since opened up RSS feeds where I’ll scrape the authornames from next time; the twitter thing was done by grabbing data from repeated calls to the twitter api.

I guess one of the things it would be good to do would be to see who was linking to whom; this could be done by subscribing to and mining the feeds, building up a directory of original post URLs and the URLs that are linked out to from those posts over time?

tony

Very cool stuff…and highlights a big weakness of my approach of using Atom and RSS feeds — they don’t report those trackbacks (though I can get links just by looking at the content in the feed and scraping by a nodes). I discovered already that there’s not as much internal linking as I might have hoped.

I’m very torn about the fact that I’m focusing on the feeds. On one hand, I know I could get a lot more data, as you have, by working with a script that goes right to wp database. On another hand, I fear updating it as WP changes. On still another hand, I also want this to scrape data from Drupal, Blogger, Omeka, and any other future application we use. I can’t write a new script (and maintain it!) for each app, but I can count on a feed of one kind or another. So the Vishnu-factor of too many hands on one side is keeping me concentrated on the feeds.

Since I’m working in RDF, I’m hoping in the future to be able to play nicely with the plugins being produced by the SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) folks. But there’s another hand, there — I’d be counting on _others_ to install those plugins. Until the virtues of installing those plugins are more widely embraced, I don’t want to count on them being there. Indeed, part of the sneaky mission of this is to demonstrate some of the virtues of making your data available in RDF to encourage that adoption.

That said, I am curious about the script you mention — I suspect it won’t be too hard to tweak it to report data as RDF and, at least for UMWBlogs, we might be able to bring it in that way.

Thanks!
Patrick

how’s about doing something to the network graphs in
http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/visualising-the-ou-twitter-network/
or
http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blogarchive/014984.html
or
http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blogarchive/014840.html

I think i have a php script that will take an export from wp, mine the internal trackbacks and generate a dotfile for graphviz if you want it? (Not done one for scraping links out of RSS descriptions yet, to see how blogposts relate to each other that way? Maybe you know someone who could tweak the code to do that?)