We’ve received lots of interesting, and sometimes constructively critical, comments on our map of the U.S. political webosphere. As we’re still at the Personal Democracy Forum, we haven’t had time to factor in everything but thank you all. We have simply corrected a graphing error for Andrew’s Sullivan presence on the map. We actually had two websites for him, on both sides of the political spectrum. This has been amended and http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/ is now the sole remaining website, slightly in the progressive community…

It seems that both the Republican party and the Democratic party have finally settled on their respective nominees. Once the vice presidential candidates have been chosen, the 2008 primary season will be definitively behind us.At Presidential Watch 08 we also believe it’s more than time to shift our focus to the general election.As a consequence, we have upated our map of the U.S. political webosphere for even more insight into the presidential race. Our new map, of which a small preview is shown here, will reveal:- the 500 most influential websites of the U.S. political webosphere;- the newcomers to this online territory;- the locations of the candidates’ websites;- a refined categorisation of websites that abandons traditional media categories (Mainstream Media vs. Social Media) to offer an accurate view of this territory as one of mainly partisan websites, with some playing the role of information pits (or infopits, but we’ll come back to that in a following post).We have also prepared very interesting case studies that will reveal, on our maps, the presence of large policy issues in specific areas of the political webosphere or the existence of sub-communities among the Liberals and the Conservatives.We will be showcasing all this and more at the Beyondbroadcast conference in Washington D.C., at the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC. and on presidentialwatch08.comStay tuned for an insightful approach to the general networked election!

As you’ve no doubt realized by now, we like maps, and of course we like people who also like cutting-edge, slightly puzzling internet maps. So who better than Chadwick Matlin and E. J. Kalafarski, founders of MapTheCandidates.com and hosts of a recent panel on “Political Cartography 2.0” at the 2008 Politics Online Conference to have a little chat about internet mapping:

- First of all, could you tell us a bit about Mapthecandidates.com: how did it come about? Are you planning to add new features for the general election?

MTC came about last summer from the realization that there was going to be massive amounts of data about presidential candidates available in the coming election, but no intuitive way of searching it. We wanted to provide a tool that could be useful in different ways to different demos: the “average joe” voter who might be wondering where their candidate is today, media analysts looking for trends in statistics, and political operatives trying to get a feel
for the campaign map.

A lot of usability testing went into finding the most intuitive ways of viewing and manipulating the map. We thought of the sidebars as the “axes” of a graph, starting with lists of the candidates and locations as widgets that users should immediately recognize. With the explosion of the amount of data, ways of filtering and restricting the data obviously became more crucial, such as the inclusion of the timeline, a suggestion from a colleague. Tying in articles and videos
came from our obvious love of new media, and we hope its been useful for people who can’t follow around their favorite candidate in person.

For the general election, we’re pursuing options for making MTC available for more than just the Presidential race. We’re envisioning a network of smaller MTC applications, maintained by regional Web sites and publications, creating a hierarchical database of data on local, state, and national races. The types of analysis that could come from such a detailed database could really be fascinating.

- You recently hosted a conference panel on “political cartography 2.0″. This is a brand new trend in digital politics, thanks in large part to mash-ups and new applications. Where do you see this trend going? Do you foresee broader implications for political and social communications, beyond campaign season?

We absolutely see this field expanding even after this election cycle is long over. One interesting statistic I learned recently is that Google estimates that 80% of data can be mapped in some way; there are huge amounts of data already collected that can be looked at in new ways we haven’t even tried yet. Maps are a tremendous tool because of their ubiquity; most users can recognize a map of their country, and thus immediately have a starting point for analysis of
the data mapped on it; it’s a generous learning curve you don’t get with other interfaces.

Moving forward, I think the toughest problem is going to be standardization of the data. Data comes in so many different formats (and sometimes, such as in emailed correspondence from campaigns, completely unformatted) that formatting it logically will become the bottleneck very quickly as the mapping technologies themselves jump forward.

- Last but not least, could you recommend to our readers a few sites (beside yours) showing interesting demos of political cartography?

The Electoral Map is a fantastic blog/round-up of the most interesting maps on the Internet that we read frequently, and its author, Patrick Ottenhoff, was a participant on our panel at POLC. The tools generated by the development team at NYTimes.com, really a powerhouse of map creation, are very interesting also.

Curious about about the Presidential Watch ‘08 map? Here are some answers to the most common questions asked:

I. Drawing the map

The PresidentialWatch08 map is composed of the 297 most visible and influential websites and blogs - out of a complete dataset of over 2000 sites - using Linkfluence’s proprietary crawl technology.

The map includes both social media and mainstream media outlets. The sites are divided into four different categories, or communities (manually labelled):
- Conservative
- Independent
- Mass Media
- Progressive

In terms of methodology, we initiated the process by focusing on a set of a few hundred websites and blogs well-recognized by search engines and other sites related to US politics. Then, we collected the URLs of all sites located just one click away from our initial set - which amounted to tens of thousands of websites.

Why was this step important? Because when it comes to networks – and the web is one giant network – there’s a rule that says that what’s similar to a given node in terms of content will stand close to this node in terms of location. Working with a set of websites large enough, one can collect all the other important websites dealing with the same topics using the “one click removed” idea.

Thanks to a series of metrics, both topology-related (i.e. how many sites link to a particular site) and semantics-related (i.e. are the words used of political nature), we were able to single out over 2,000 websites that constitute the core of the US political webosphere. From these, we extracted the most link-relevant 297 sites.

II. Navigating the map

The PW08 map’s default view is set to display all the categories at once (Conservative, Independent, Mass Media, Progressive). You can select the individual communities you’re interested in and more carefully analyze the links existing between them - most notable to see who links to whom, and what their level of authority is within their community.

See the notice for more practical details on map navigation.

III. Understanding the map

As shown in the map’s navigation bar, a node’s color indicates the community it belongs to, and a node’s size indicates its authority degree (overall number of inbound links) or its Xeno degree (number of inbound links coming from nodes belonging to other categories).

The more links a node receives from other nodes shown on the map, the bigger it appears on the map. Note that the link count is based solely upon links coming from nodes on the map. Links coming from websites located outside of the map are excluded. Based on this approach, we can determine the level of authority attributed to a given site within these communities. This approach may occasionally favor bloggers who splog (spam-blog) others, artificially generating inbound links to their blogs by an abusive use of such techniques as trackbacks. Given the size of the map’s set of websites, we were able to make sure such artificial results were not present.

Nodes are positioned on the map according to a topological placement algorithm, i.e. each node is positioned solely according to its linking pattern, without consideration for the stated political affiliation of the site or its content.

Many algorithms make possible for a 2D rendering of an adjacent matrix - i.e. the matrix describing any graph. We used a Fruchterman Rheingold algorithm, which shares with all the others the same basic principle: minimizing the system’s energy while maximizing the use of the space available for the representation of the data. To minimize the system’s energy, one can for instance assume that nodes that are not linked to each other are pushing away from each other whereas nodes that are linked to each other are attracting each other. Through iterative steps the algorithm tries to find a way to position nodes where there is as little link overlap as possible. To maximize the use of the mapped space, the graph is spread as much as possible over the surface allocated for its display.

These positioning principles call for the following reading conventions:

• A site’s position on the map depends solely upon its linking policy. A node has no predefined position, the latter being the result of the relations it has with other nodes. This means that a node with no links at all cannot be positioned on the map, which is why we excluded such websites from the PW08 map;

• North, East, South and West don’t matter. The displayed space is not based on the cardinal system (North, East, South, West), which means that the choice of a relative left-right or top-down position is purely arbitrary. Overall, we chose to respect the obvious left-right political axis. The further left you look, the more liberal the site. The further right, the more conservative;

• Hubs are center-stage. The displayed space is polarized in a center to periphery tension. The nodes positioned at the center are the ones receiving the most links from other nodes that don’t link much to one another (exogamous nodes). The nodes positioned at the periphery receive fewer links but they receive them from other nodes that tend to link to one another (endogamous nodes). For instance, the PW08 map clearly shows the pivotal position held by the mass media, the sites of large media outlets receiving links from sites pertaining to all the other communities;

• It’s not size, it’s density. The map shouldn’t be interpreted with respect to the surface occupied by a given community or subset of nodes. Rather it should be construed with respect to density levels. For instance, two communities may stretch over equally-sized surfaces, with one forming a tight-knit community and the other being looser-knit. An online territory can be occupied by few sites with few links, thus showing a low density level; it can also be occupied by many sites with many links, thus showing a high density level. On the map the “strength” of a community can be inferred from its density and the thickness of the web woven by its nodes. For instance, a zone with a low density level spreading over a large surface should be construed as containing sites with hardly any links to sites in other communities, links being made between nodes within this community (hypertextual endogamy)

That’s it. Now you can navigate inside the PW08 map and analyze in detail the relations between sites and communities.

With less than a year to go before election day, the battlefield is already crowded with troops. The Republican and Democrat primaries have brought all supporters and cybersupporters in the debate. Whereas a few months ago American candidates were sending envoys to France to spot the presidential netcampaign’s best practices, they are now the ones steering the wheel, finding new ways to campaign online, pushing further the borders of traditional politics. The netcampaign will take place in every corner of the Internet, from the now ancient e-mails and newsgroups to the new web 2.0 community sites and apps such as Twitter or Digg. It will visit both the most crowded spaces such as YouTube, MySpace or Facebook and the most confidential and secluded - what about some political debating in Lake Ontario’s fly fishing newsgroups? And of course it will still happen within the blogosphere, on thousands of opinion outlets held by supporters, journalists, candidates, writers or citizens. Continuously or from time to time, they will carry, consider or mix the impressive flow of texts, images and sounds published daily by the mass media and, more and more, by their peers.

What do we offer? Some perspective on this very dense flow of opinions. The ability to apprehend the size of this phenomenon by measuring it.

The first measures are made by the topographic surveyor: measure a territory, draw its borders, distinguish its vicinity, spot the highs and lows. The first territory we have mapped is not the multi-dimensional Internet, with too many fronts to cover at the same time! No, the first territory we’ve mapped is the political blogosphere, the territory of all the blogs that will follow and take part in this election. Maybe we should talk about the political webosphere as all the blogs contained therein are not isolated from their hypertextual environments, from sites they link to and they’re linked from. It is this whole ecosystem of intertwined websites that we’ve represented and that we’ll monitor in 2008.

Last spring, we mapped the French political webosphere within the context of the 2007 presidential election. The most astonishing part is that the pulse of this territory, as shown in the map and the various monitors we had set up, actually gave a very good idea of the final outcome, with the ones leading the race on the Internet actually leading the polls. Hence, we suggest you keep a close eye on Presidential Watch 2008 all along the year!

The troops are now ready and trained, the battlefield is before us. Let the political strategists unfold their maps and their most ambitious tactics.