 This is not a picture of the cosmos nor a slide of a cell. This is a picture of thousands of blogs linking to each other over the internet. This image helps us understand how people share ideas online. Blogs have provided the world with records of millions of online conversations. The Bergman Center's research on blog spheres seeks to analyze the different communities that exist online in the way that information flows through the network. Distributed macro structures arise from linking patterns in blogs. Images like this allow us to visualize the links that blogs are making in the way that these blogs connect with each other. The Bergman Center and Morningside Analytics have created ways to show these linkages in a graphical manner. By graphical, we don't just mean visual. Rather, we're referring to an organizational structure called the graph. The graph is comprised of two sets of things, vertices and edges. In these studies, the Bergman Center and Morningside Analytics analyze foreign language bloggers spheres by creating network graphs consisting of approximately 10,000 of the most linked two blogs in each language group. In these graphs, the linking behavior of bloggers create proximity clusters, or network neighborhoods, based on common linking patterns among bloggers, as well as attentive clusters or communities based on what bloggers are linking out to in the larger web. If we have a group of bloggers who frequently are linked to each other, we may want our graph to show them as being closer together. With these graphs, we see how blogs connect to each other in the way they cluster into groups of like-minded bloggers. This is how the Internet Democracy Project analyzes the blogosphere. This is our universe of blogs. It is empty now, but here are some bloggers talking about the latest news. Notice that the blogs are getting pushed to the sides of our universe. The algorithm used is always trying to push blogs to the periphery. Here, some users are linking to other users' blogs. We can see user A linking to content on user B's blog. Here's some more linking between our blogs. Notice how when a blog links to multiple blogs, those linked-to blogs get pulled together. Note that it is the blogs being linked to that are being pulled, and the blog that creates the link doing the polling. This is useful visually because the more noteworthy blogs will migrate away from the edge of the universe, and the blogs that no one is linking to will stay on the periphery. This can help us identify blogger communities with similar linking patterns. Additionally, when a blog is frequently linked to, it grows in size. It is useful to be able to gauge the influence of blogs and cluster them based on how bloggers link to them. For example, if one community of bloggers commonly links to one set of blogs, such as Cat Fancy, Beeline Friends, and the Meow Spot, these cat-centric blogs will get clustered together. Meanwhile, if another set of bloggers commonly link to another set of blogs, such as Dog Days, The Daily Canine, and Rough Times, then these dog-based blogs will be clustered together. It is also nice to visualize the community based on who thinks what is important. Our nodes are colored based on what type of websites bloggers will link out to in the larger Internet. So, if there exists a community of bloggers who commonly link to websites popular with cat lovers, such as Meow Street and Alley Cat, we assign those blogs with a similar linking pattern the same color. We call this community of bloggers an attentive cluster since they are defined by what they are paying attention to. Now, imagine doing this for thousands of blogs. The Internet and Democracy Group at the Berkman Center in Morningside Analytics have created various maps for groups of blogs in multiple locations. The Persian blogosphere features two political polls, the conservative and religious blogs on one side, and the more secular-minded and reformist blogs on the other side of the network. This is representative of the Iranian political system. As for the Arabic blogosphere, it did not have the same bipolar clustering, but did find many of the oppositional groups who played key roles in the Arab Spring actively engaged in oppositional political discussion in an online organization. Therefore, the graph looks more diverse and less separated than the Persian graph. Russia was similar in that the blog clustering was not pro-government versus anti-government. Instead, the blogs exhibited a lot of different communities, mostly critical of the Iranian. However, some were centered around specific topics they felt important, such as the environment, charity, and even historical preservation of St. Petersburg. The blogosphere, Twitter, and other public-facing digital communication platforms offer a rich view of the ideas, perspectives, and structure of online discourse. The Internet is offering a new window into understanding political and social change around the world in a variety of different social and political contexts. By mapping individual linking behaviors of users online, it becomes apparent that the Internet has facilitated a world of open discourse and ideas, what has been referred to as the networked public sphere. Based on how Internet users link to one another, we can infer how one user's voice is connected to and holds weight within the world of ideas the Internet is always discussing. In mapping these voices and the links they make, we can begin to unravel the naturally occurring structures within the blogosphere.