Blogs persistent?

An article by Kumar et al. in the December issue of CACM (Communications of the ACM) deals with the structure and evolution of blogspace. The conclusion of the article is that blogosphere is a rich and complex social environment that admit for further research. The authors view the emergence of the blogosphere in three layers: the individual blogger that can be defined by its prime characteristics such as age, geography and interests. The second layer consists of bloggers that belong to the same interest groups, mainly having the same geographic and/or demographic correlations. The top layer consists of so called blog communities. Their empirical research study with more than 25,000 blogs involved showed that these communities show identifiable bursts of activity over a certain period of time. Interestingly enough the magnitude/level of burstiness seems to increase over time suggesting that local community structure and and community-level interactions are being reinforced as blogspace grows. They therefore conclude that blogs will remain a pervasive phenomen on the Web. Thus this research of Kumar et al. underlines the hypothese of Zerfaß who claims that the blogosphere is a new emerging, global communication arena.