The document discusses the significance of academic blogging, particularly in archaeology, by analyzing its visibility and connections within the broader internet landscape. It presents data on network statistics and the clustering of various online communities, highlighting the central role of specific individuals and topics. The findings demonstrate how academic blogging can serve as a vital signal amidst the noise of the vast online ecosystem.

1. Signal versus NoiseWhy Academic Blogging Matters: A structural argumentShawn Graham, RPADepartment of History,Carleton University@electricarchaeoImage CC Paul Keller

2. Omniadisce; posteavidebisnihilessesuperfluumFather Leonard Boyle, http://www.pims.ca/academics/boyle.htmlHugh of St Victor teaching three monks From De ArcaMorali (13th Century) Ms. Laud. Misc. 409, f° 3v. The Bodeleian Library, Oxford

3. Size of the InternetCarpenter, Brian. Observed Relationships between Size Measures of the Internet or Is the Internet really just a star network after all? 6.

4. Wayback Machine, Showing Yahoo on October 20 1996

5. Pagerank, according to WikipediaMathematical PageRanks (out of 100) for a simple network (PageRanks reported by Google are rescaled logarithmically). Page C has a higher PageRank than Page E, even though it has fewer links to it; the link it has is of a much higher value. A web surfer who chooses a random link on every page (but with 15% likelihood jumps to a random page on the whole web) is going to be on Page E for 8.1% of the time. (The 15% likelihood of jumping to an arbitrary page corresponds to a damping factor of 85%.) Without damping, all web surfers would eventually end up on Pages A, B, or C, and all other pages would have PageRank zero. Page A is assumed to link to all pages in the web, because it has no outgoing links.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

6. Needle in a Haystack,the finding thereof.Image cc Graham Horn

7. Teaching the MachineImage CC Derrick Bostrom

8. Segal, David. 2010 ‘A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web’. The New York Times, Nov. 26.

9. Understanding our signalsThe web of responses to Colleen’s Week 2 of the ‘Blogging Archaeology’ carnival

10. NoiseResults of search, ‘Blogging Archaeology’ on Google.com (not a phrase-search), April 1 2010. After 20 minutes, nodes=8532, edges=8949

11. Network stats:Diameter: 8Average Path Length: 3Filter the network so that only nodes with > 30 connections appear, reduces the graph to ~1.5 % of the nodes, and 10% of all the connectionsLeaves us with 4 communities, per modularity detection.

12. SignalThe archaeological blogosphere: greenThe cloud: light blue (Google, Amazon, Youtube,)Social Media: Purple (Facebook, Twitter; also online newspapers)News aggregators: Red (news.google.com)Turns out, Colleen is the center of the world. Size of node = betweeness centrality

13. “Roman Archaeology” on the internet

14. Network StatsDiameter: 10Average Path Length: 6Filter the network so that only nodes with > 30 connections appear, reduces the graph to ~3 % of the nodes, and 23% of all the connectionsLeaves us with 9 communities, per modularity detection.Results of search, “Roman Archaeology” on Google.com, April 1 2010. After 20 minutes, nodes=6240, edges=13 216

15. Signal.AcademiaBlogs & TwitterWikipediaGoogle & News sitesSize of node = betweeness centrality

16. Reference linksCarpenter, Brian. 2010. Observed Relationships between Size Measures of the Internet or Is the Internet really just a star network after all?. http://bit.ly/dUjL89 [April 1 2010]Gephi.org. 2010. Gephi, an open source graph visualization and manipulation software. http://gephi.org [April 1 2010]Jacomy, M. P. Girard, A. Delanoe. Navicrawler 1.7.3http://bit.ly/eUqTuR [April 1 2010]“Leonard Boyle” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Boyle [April 1 2010]Levy, Steve. 2010. ‘How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web’ Wired March. http://bit.ly/9Pg9W8 [April 1 2010]Segal, David. 2010 ‘A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web’. The New York Times, Nov. 26. http://nyti.ms/hR7Iqy [April 1 2010]Singhal, Amit. 2010 .“Official Google Blog: Being bad to your customers is bad for business” Dec. 1. http://bit.ly/hsoRaX [April 1 2010]“PageRank” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank [April 1 2010]