Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story:
Microdoc News has been studying the way a story enters the blogosphere, develops, and draws to a conclusion... Each blogosphere story has a definite beginning, develops along quite predictable lines and comes to a predictable end. Stories develop over a period of between 7 and 27 days.
What is a blogosphere story?
Weblogs by nature are highly interlinked sources of information which capture a weblog writer's opinion on a topic in a single post and interlink that opinion to other weblogs and sources of information. Through a mixture of opinion and interlinking with other sites a reader of weblogs can sample a wide range of opinions and can identify what is important about a particular topic. Each weblog post is not meant to be a complete story in itself, but rather is part of a larger story that develops across a number of weblogs and other information sources to build what we call a blogosphere story.
Includes a colourful, if somewhat confusing, diagram for those of you who dig the boxes-and-arrows thing.
(Via blogdex.)
.....Addendum: Keeners may also wish to read this paper in Competing Memes Analysis:
Competing Memes Analysis is a method that makes studies of consequential topics no more difficult than those with minimal importance. It is a three step process that
(1) organizes activities into groups of competing memes that often emerge in developmental successions,
(2) codes records of activities for the presence or absence of each meme, and
(3) constructs models of the changing frequencies of the memes.