Changes in Connection Patterns between National Domains

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Han Woo Park, who shifts our focus beyond blogs, and towards the Web more generally. He begins by highlighting the importance of diachronic studies, and his project undertakes such a study against the backdrop of a growing globalisation of communication networks, balanced by an increasing diversification of communication flows.

The project examined this by taking a longitudinal approach that examines changes in network patterns over time - applied here to global cyberspace overall through a comparison of observations in 2003 and 2009. It used search engines AltaVista (2003) and Yahoo! (2009; it had acquired AltaVista in the meantime) to identify levels of incoming and outgoing links between country-code top-level domains. (For the US, .edu, .gov., .mil, and .us were counted as its ccTLDs, given that .com, .org, and .net are far from US-specific.)

These data were explored to identify the centrality of nations: in 2009, Germany , the US, the UK, France, Japan, and Spain were leading countries here (with obvious caveats about the US ranking). Han says that the EU functioned almost as a unified country here. The G7 countries and Spain featured highly, overall. Several countries also were important nodes, connecting minor countries - Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, clustered closely, and connected some minor South American countries; Russia connected various other post-Soviet countries; China also connected Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Laos.

There was a distinct diversification since 2003, therefore, when no significant sub-clustering occurred and countries were mainly still arranged around the US as the central connecting node. Europe as a whole was much more central to the network, in particular. There were significant changes especially for the most central countries, as well as for the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries. Centrality in the network follows a power law distribution, with various cultural and linguistic groupings also emerging. The structural position of a country in this network may also point to its potential for development and international interactions, of course. All up, though, the overall structure of the international network remained relatively stable.

Limitations to this are the placement of the US, given the absence of a dominant ccTLD, while domains like .de for Germany are also occasionally used for sites in Delaware, .tv is widely used by sites outside Tuvalu, and other ccTLDs are similarly non-specific. Domains like .com also need to be distributed properly across countries

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