How Piratpartiet.se is linked on the Internet – a graph w IssueCrawler

The trial is going on in Sweden against The Pirate Bay. It might be interesting to see how the official party wing – Piratpartiet – and its www site is connected on the net.

Graph 1: How pirate party www sites were connected in April, 2007.

Original 1200px img dl here (1,2mb png)

I made this SNA graph about piratpartiet.se in April, 2007 with IssueCrawler, a very recommendable and free SNA tool on the net invented by Govcom.org and its director dr Richard Rogers. I cover IC issues later more, but the basic idea of this tools is, that it crawls voluntarily made www links between the www sites. So this (human-made) www linking indicates, that people who make links, somehow appreciate the sites to they are linking. This means that you can make at least slight expectations which kind of people or movement is making these links.

The graph shows at least that Piratpartiet.se is much more networked than to piracy issues only. There are heavy connections to issues like wikis, copyrights, open source etc. and that indicates that people in the party are more keen about the overall issues than just swapping commercial files for free.

The Piratpartiet.se graph is a part of my article Pirates in politics – internet piracy as individualised politics (2008). It was published with deeper analysis about the Swedish piracy movement itself in Net working / Networking: Citizen Initiated Internet Politics (Tapio Häyhtiö and Jarmo Rinne eds., Tampere University Press 2008). Introduction about the anthology in facebook.

The anthology Net working / Networking itself is some kind of quite interesting update to the net activism issues nowadays handled previously in the dawn of hactivism in another anthology: McCaughey, Martha & Ayers, Michael D. (eds.) (2003). Cyberactivism. Online Activism in Theory and Practice. Routledge, New York.