As Robin Hamman points out, there are all sorts of personal connections between the journalists named in Press Gazette’s UK journalism blogroll feature today.

Because many of the bloggers named in the piece also use the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us, it is even possible to visualise these connections using the amazing (and addictive) Del.icio.us Network Explorer social network analysis tool.

The dark nodes in the network above are people named in connection with the Press Gazette piece. I’m the green dot in the middle (only because I started exporling the network with my own user name), and Robin Hamman is the orange one.

Jem Stone is the large node at the top with links to many of the others. The author of the Press Gazette feature, Graham Holliday is to Robin’s 10 o’clock position, and Richard Sambrook is at Robin’s 3 o’clock.

Further exploration of the network reveals some other important nodes in the network, whose involvment in the jounralism blogger community is largely centred on their del.icio.us use: Sun communities editor Ilana Fox and Trinity Mirror’s director of regional digital media, David Black. You should really be subscribing to their del.icio.us links’ RSS feeds.

Update: Ditto Alan Connor, Alistair Brown, and Bruce Combe.

On Flickr, you’ll find an annotated version of this:

Back in November, both Times Online and Guardian Unlimited rubbished Telegraph editor Will Lewis’s claim that his web site has the most UK traffic among the quality newspapers’ sites.

Lewis’ claim is based on data from Hitwise, a network-centric metric that was rejected by the editors from the two news sites generally thought to be well ahead of Telegraph.co.uk.

The dispute has become more interesting in recent days, since an anonymous member of the public has filed a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority about the Telegraph’s claim, which is now repeated in giant letters on billboards across Britain.

Today Simon Waldman, director of digital strategy at Guardian Media Group, could no longer contain himself. He has weighed in with a long, detailed post on his blog explaining the competing web metrics available, and why he feels these suggest that the Telegraph’s claim is bunk.

Sure, the newspapers like a good public row. But one of the bigger issue in this dispute, Waldman concludes, is that online publishers are failing to stick to the standard of audience measurement represented by the audited unique user measure prescribed by ABC Electronic:

There is little that’s perfect about measuring Unique Users. It’s not the same as people. But we have all (including the Telegraph, indirectly) agreed through Jicwebs that audited unique users are the way forward. At least it is consistent and frankly, our industry looks a shambles if we keep hopping from one metric to the other just because it suits us.

Stay tuned.