Eric’s got a raft of new stuff including links to the Weblog BookWatch and this mighty innerestin’ java-based map of the blogosphere.

The blogosphere map is arranged in a spiral, and the author claims it’s an arbitrary choice; yet Paul Frankenstein wondered aloud in his entry for May 5 about the possibility of such a map, and used, maybe coined (?) the word “blogosphere”. So perhaps the spiral is not as arbitrary as the original author thinks.

The map is searchable; scroll down to the search box at the bottom and type a key word for a given blogteur (blogthor? blogger, I guess), and immediately you can see the links fanning out from the blog under examination.

For example, since Justin Slotman’s Insolvent Repubic of Blogistan is both well-known and often linked to, type his last name into the search box to see his linky-ness.

A few weeks ago, Steven Den Beste wrote about communities of links and how he suspects that shared interests and viewpoints condition the links that a blogger adds to their pages; the net effect is to create clusters based on same-interest linking.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I rarely read Den Beste because I usally disagree with his politics and I don’t enjoy the feeling of being poked with a sharp stick. My personal awareness of this discomfort has led me to greatly curtail my own writing about politics here. Why poke you, dear reader, with the sharp stick of my own political opinions?

Enron-bashing aside, natch, that’s just comedy.

I’ve not gone into detailed research about it, but the context for Den Beste’s story is the differing approaches to blogging around the initial bloggers (grouped around Dave Winer and descended from a tech sensibility) versus the more recent batch of more-or-less political bloggers, a point Den Beste discusses.

I don’t have a thrust of argument, really, just pointing out an emergent theme. The BookWatch has the potential to reflect issues of common interest and clustering around ideology, but it crawls only sites associated with the Winer-developed “recently updated” site Weblogs.com, which is (as it should be) only integrated by default into the also Winer-developed Radio blogging app.

This would presumably tilt the list in favor of geek and tech, and indeed, it tilts that way.