Co-inlinking to a municipal Web space

ISSI conference, 15 July, 2009, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
Co-inlinking to a municipal Web space: A webometric and content analysis
Kim Holmberg
Department of Information Studies
Åbo Akademi University
(e) kim.holmberg@abo.fi
(w3) www.kimholmberg.fi

C
Co-inlinking
(colinked (Björneborn, 2004))
Interlinking
Co-outlinking
(co-linking (Björneborn, 2004))
A
B
D
2
Kim Holmberg :: kim.holmberg@abo.fi :: www.kimholmberg.fi

Municipalities and the functional regions in the Region of Finland Proper
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Research questions
Does co-inlinking to local government Web sites follow geographic patterns?
Are municipal Web sites in the same functional regions co-inlinked together more frequently than with municipalities in other functional regions?
What are the motivations to create co-inlinks to municipal Web sites?
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Methods
Data collection
1,431 queries submitted to MSN/Live Search/Bing using LexiURL Searcher
(http://lexiurl.wlv.ac.uk/)
About 78,000 pages with co-inlinks retrieved
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Methods
Comparison with neighboring connections
- QAP
- Precision / Recall
Block Density Matrix of co-inlinking connections within the functional regions
Classification of linking motivations
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Results
Maximum number of co-inlinking connections: 1,005
Minimum number of co-inlinking connections: 7
Average number of co-inlinking
connections: 54
Cut-off level in the data conversion:
54 co-inlinks
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Figure 1. Co-inlinking in the region of Finland Proper
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Results
Co-inlinking matrix
670 connections (density: 23.4%)
Geographic matrix
316 connections (density: 11%)
QAP
Simple match: 80.5% (p<0.000)
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Figure 1. Co-inlinking in the region of Finland Proper
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Figure 2. Co-inlinking that matches neighborhood
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Co-inlinking matrix combined with geography
214 matching connections (density: 7.5%)
456 unmatched co-inlinks
Precision (=M11): 67.7%
Recall (=M10): 32.0%
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Co-inlinking within the functional regions
422 connections (63%) between municipalities in same functional regions
248 connections (37%) between municipalities in different functional regions
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Table 1. Block density matrix
Table 1. The percentage of co-inlinking out of all possible
co-inlinking within and between the functional regions
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Co-inlinking motivations
Content analysis
The co-inlinkins in link lists: 87.4%
Municipalities in same geographic region: 60%
Homepages as target pages: 68.9%
Limitation
Single classifier
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Research questions
Does co-inlinking to local government Web sites follow geographic patterns?
Yes, QAP indicates a trend and the precision/recall approach confirms it, although the recall of the match between co-inlinking ang neighboring patterns was quite low
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Research questions
Are municipal Web sites in the same functional regions co-inlinked together more frequently than with municipalities in other functional regions?
Yes, 63% of the connections were within the functional regions and in some cases almost all of the possible connections within a functional region were present
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Research questions
What are the motivations to create co-inlinks to municipal Web sites?
The main motivation to co-inlink to the studied municipalities was for the source site to show a connection with the geographic area the municipalities were in
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Conclusions
Although co-inlinking was shown to be a measure of similarity, geographic similarity, because the functional regions are formed based on cooperation and commuting for work, we have indirectly been able to use co-inlinking to map cooperation between the municipalities.
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Obrigado