Communities that form around the exchange of information stand out in Matthew Hurst’s visualizations of the blogosphere. Hurst, a scientist at Microsoft’s Live Labs, used a search tool he helped design, called Blogpulse, to generate the data on which his images are based. The dense cluster at the center of this image represents what Hurst calls the core, a set of a few thousand blogs with links to and from many other sites. Other, smaller blogging communities connect to the core through one-way links (usually produced when an obscure blog at the edge links to a well-known blog at the core), represented here by hairlike strands.
