Is that outlier that is labeled "LL" Lookout Landing? Interesting that is so isolated an is part of the SBNation.

Holy crap.

Which blog is that unmarked circle right below THT? Seems to be the center.

This is fascinating, Dave. I'd love to see the labels of all the blogs on that second graph where you labeled the top 15.

Very interesting!

Too bad you couldn't do this according to link referer's to find out how the audience's relate between tons of baseball blogs. That would require lots of data from lots of sources though, so it probably can't be done.

Tyler I was also surprised to see Lookout Landing way out there. I think of them as one of the top blogs and I thought they would be in the thick of it. I think part of it is they do not do big link roundups, which tie you into lots of other blogs. Also I think that they are linked by other blogs by my 3-or-more-links-from-another-blog-to-draw-the-edge cutoff really cut down on their links in. I think that a better was to do it would be to keep all links but weigh the edges based on number of links between blogs.

Clemente that is BBTF's Primer Newsblog, which makes sense because they link a ton of stuff.

Mike, here it is. Some of my abbreviations are not super clear, but it is the best I could do. If there is one you are wondering about ask. When making those abbreviations I noticed that a ton of the SB nation blogs are two-word alliterations: Amazin Avenue, Lookout Landing, Royals Review, Red Reporter, Camden Chat, Twinkie Town and Bluebird Banter.

Fack Youk, Amazin Avenue and Brew Crew Ball are three relatively separate nodes all sending out tons of links. I also really like how strongly the sabermetric-based non-team blogs cluster out together in the middle.

Thanks, Dave!

I think while there is a lot of idea-sharing that goes on between the USSM/Lookout Landing authors and the broader saber community, there is not a lot of direct linking of articles between the two groups going either way. I think that's a purposeful choice by those authors to develop their communities that way and it seems to work well for them. Sometimes, though, it means that their good saber-related work gets ignored in the broader saber community. In the offseason, I tend to follow LL pretty closely, but during the season, I don't keep up as much.

Dave, did Viva El Birdos show up in your data? I can't seem to find it in the massive web you linked to above.

My blog didn't even make their Yankees list! Someone click on my name so maybe I'll register :)

You should be careful about inferring clusters from graph visualizations, as that is known [in the research literature] to potentially be highly misleading. (Not that the computational algorithms to find cohesive groups don't have their issues as well, but it's still in general worth being careful with such visualizations.)

Very cool. I was surprised to see Camden Crazies (me) included, and it was neat that it showed up in the middle there with BA, The Book, FanGraphs, and the like.

You might want to distinguish in-degree from out-degree here. The in-degree is how many things link to it, while the out-degree is how many things it links to. In-degree is usually considered to be more important when discussing things like authority, respectability, etc. Google uses in-degree for its page rankings, for example.

Nick,

Viva El Birdos is definitely a top 200 blog according to BallHype, but it neither linked any other blog more than three times nor was linked by any other blog more than three times so it did not show up in the smaller networks (it is one of the nodes in the bigger first network). I think that was a real draw back to my method. In simplifying the network I threw away a lot of the structure.

Phil,

Definitely in-degree and out-degree are very different and that BallHype uses in-degree for their rankings, but here I am not ranking the blogs or saying anything about their authority or respectability. Also the links in the network are directed, you can see the arrows signifying who is linking whom.