The Touchgraph for the “Beijing Olympics”
The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google’s database of related sites.
The image above, made with the Touchgraph Browser, is a result of the search for the term “Beijing Olympics”. Click for a larger image in a separate window. The green wheel is made up of Chinese websites, in English, referring to the Beijing Olympics. They have no discernable links to the other hubs, which include the IOC, the official site of the Olympic Movement, the official site of Athens 2004, the US, UK and Australian Olympic associations and teams, Wikipedia, NBC and others. Touchgraph is clearly not an exhaustive search of links and edges between major websites, but this is notable, especially when compared to the map for Athens 2004:
The Athens 2004 Touchgraph
Athens2004.com is the big blue circle with links surrounding it in various languages. This is remarkable especially because Athens 2004 is a dead site.
So what does this mean? Well, Touchgraph measures connectivity, though they don’t specify what precisely that means. It is some sort of calculus of the links in both directions between two webpages, and stops drilling down relatively quickly. But given the same calculus for each Olympics, its interesting that practically none of the sites that exist in China, written in English, are linked to or from the major English Olympics sites outside China. China may be coming out to the world this Olympics, but apparently their webpages haven’t.