Visualizing the web, and blogging as a social network

While inspecting referral logs ([you narcissist, you -- ed.]), Semantic Compositions was pleased to discover a new blog from a Swedish graduate student interested in social networks. Although SC took a couple of sociolinguistics courses as an undergrad, he is hardly current on research along those lines. Still, one of the best ways to win over the geek in SC ([that would be coextensional with all of you -- ed.]) is to post things like visualizations of the web.

SC admits to being intrigued by this blogger's interest in linguistics of blogs in particular. Blogs seem to have a couple of interesting linguistic properties different from other Internet-based discussion fora. Unlike chat rooms, IRC, instant messages, etc., bloggers seem to generally employ very little shorthand -- SC would not have gotten involved in blogging if people wrote things like "If U cn rd this, UR cool". "blog" also seems to have become a morpheme -- not a cranberry morpheme, because it can be used independently -- which is quite productive. SC can attest to "moblog", "warblog", and "flublog", not to mention "blogosphere", and he's sure that readers have seen plenty of others. There's probably an interesting paper or two to be written about the propensity of bloggers to coin ironic and/or humorous terminology, like "eggcorn" and "snowclone" (although such a paper would have to split the world into Geoff Pullum and Everybody Else). And of course, from the standpoint of networking, there's nothing quite like TrackBack in any other communications medium. Mark Liberman hints at some of the directions this might go in, using the example "I, for one, welcome our new X overlords".

UPDATE: Languagehat points out that the blog may be new, but the blogger sure isn't. And she's actually an American in Sweden, not a Swede. Oops. Still, as SC notes in the comments section, the particular blog that the visualization discussion is located in is quite new, so we'll take 1/2 credit for accuracy in the above post ([Maybe that should be 1/3; Languagehat got you on two points, and you only got one right -- ed.]). (Added 1-30-2004 at 12:46 P.M.)

Comments

[language hat]

By "a new blog" I assume you mean "a blog new to me," since she's had her blog for almost a year now; I wrote about it last May. She does have interesting interests. (By the way, Stephanie's an American in Sweden, not a Swede.)

[language hat]

By "a new blog" I assume you mean "a blog new to me," since she's had her blog for almost a year now; I wrote about it last May. She does have interesting interests. (By the way, Stephanie's an American in Sweden, not a Swede.)

[Semantic Compositions]

Stephanie seems to have established multiple blogs on the site; the one I linked to, labeled "Melange", has a post on January 24th of this year, titled "first post". It seems to be devoted to a narrower focus than this one or this one. Melange is the one I noticed a hit from, so that's what I decided to link to, but you're right, she's certainly been blogging in general longer than she's been posting to that particular one.