This paper is an exploration of the concept of authority as it is manifested in the community of webloggers. The Blogdex aggregator has been collecting data on the referential information contained within weblogs for the past 3 years, namely the hypertext links contained within webloggers’ writing. Using the links between weblogs as a proxy to social structure, we construct a representation of the social networks of the weblog community and employ social network analysis to describe the aggregate effects of status. Two measures of authority are explored: popularity, as measured by webloggers’ public affiliations and influence measured by citation of each others writing. These metrics are evaluated with respect to each other and with the authority conferred by references in the popular press.

The weblog medium, while fundamentally an innovation in personal publishing has also come to engender a new form of social interaction on the web: a massively distributed but completely connected conversation covering every imaginable topic of interest. A byproduct of this ongoing communication is the set of hyperlinks made between weblogs in the exchange of dialog, a form of social acknowledgement on the part of authors. This paper seeks to understand the social implications of linking in the community, drawing from the hyperlink citations collected by the Blogdex project over the past 3 years. Social network analysis is employed to describe the resulting social structure, and two measures of authority are explored: popularity, as measured by webloggers’ public affiliations and influence measured by citation of each others writing. These metrics are evaluated with respect to each other and with the authority conferred by references in the popular press.