Network Formation in the Political Blogosphere: An Application of Agent Based Simulation and e-Research Tools

The political blogosphere has become the focus of attention of researchers from disciplines such as political science and network science. In a recent paper, Adamic and Glance (LinkKDD '05: Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on link discovery, 2005, pp. 443-452) report differences between the linking behavior of politically conservative versus politically liberal web bloggers. We construct a simple agent-based network formation model which shows that one such difference, demonstrating what we term 'political homophily', can be generated by connecting the blogosphere to the underlying population distribution of political preferences. The model is implemented as a web service in the e-Research tool VOSON (Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks), and both model and tool serve to define a natural environment for research into link formation behavior with large numbers of heterogeneous network participants.