Comments on: The population of political blogs

By: Ileana

Ileana — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 04:17:42 +0000

Some blogs that are less widely read are relatively influential. Check out Blogstreet, which weights blogs according to the prestige of those who link to them. http://blogstreet.com/

By: Martha Bridegam

Martha Bridegam — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 00:51:41 +0000

This Memorial Day weekend’s sudden attention to the letter by Sharon Underwood about her gay son would make a good test case for following a meme around the echo chamber. I’ve done a little playing with this idea at http://home.pacbell.net/mabjo/martha.html#490 .

By: w

Fri, 28 May 2004 01:22:07 +0000

In connection with the point about how much # of comments means, consider this absurdity: http://www.laze.net/fait/archive/2002/07/28/maurys_blooper.php Doesn’t seem that even the people who leave comments read that website!

By: Claudia M

Claudia M — Fri, 28 May 2004 00:58:29 +0000

Take a look at BlogLines, which is a terrific web-based blog reader service. It has a lot of user info that’s shared with other users. It’s mostly reflecting subscriptions to RSS feeds (as opposed to traffic measured from the blog’s perspective by hits or links). I’d bet the founder, Mark Fletcher, would be quite interested in discussing your research program. His personal blog is wingedpig.com.

By: decon

decon — Wed, 26 May 2004 23:06:44 +0000

Alexas is decent for somethings, but it doesn’t help at all with blogger blogs.

By: david

david — Wed, 26 May 2004 16:00:06 +0000

what is your research question?

By: David Brake

David Brake — Wed, 26 May 2004 10:58:04 +0000

While I think about it – are you tacitly wanting commentary about US politics by Americans? If so how do you plan to separate them from weblogs from elsewhere commenting on US politics? P.S. There used to be a master directory of Blogger weblogs. Is there still? I couldn’t find it on their site. Is there any up to date info on the relative popularity of the various weblogging platforms?

By: David Brake

David Brake — Wed, 26 May 2004 10:33:38 +0000

You could try this Alexa page or others – Alexa claims to estimate traffic by measuring the behaviour of people who use their add-on software (it reports – benignly – back to HQ). Of course it isn’t rigorous but it’s the only source of public traffic data I know of that measures the traffic of low traffic sites. Though you could ask people like Comscore if they have any data. On a similar subject, how would people try to sample the much broader field of home pages and weblogs in the UK - to be more precise “sites that are not primarily in furtherance of professional goals (eg online CVs, galleries of art from artists etc), are not explicitly temporary, are substantially the work of a single individual, and are not closed to the public either explicitly (through a password) or implicitly (for example collections of photos from an event without an accompanying narrative that are only meant to be accessed by a small group for a short time even if they are openly available online).” I thought about sampling randomly from directories compiled by Geocities or Freeserve/Wanadoo but I looked and it seems they no longer index their pages. Using Yahoo or DMoz would introduce obvious biases because submission is not automatic. Tripod still does have directories of its UK users but how representative would Tripod users be of all users? Searching for “personal home page uk” in Google gets me nowhere. How should I balance blogs with home pages? Using the stats from Pew suggests I should include about one blog for every four home pages…

By: vivian

vivian — Wed, 26 May 2004 00:30:59 +0000

Separate the two parts of the problem: (1) find large numbers of blogs with claims to be political (2) decide on rules for deciding what counts as “political” for your purposes, and why, and then worry about how to count popularity, probably looking at several methods. If you initially aim for comprehensiveness, you’ll keep looking, using all these suggested techniques, until eventually you realize you’re only getting pointed to blogs you’ve already counted. Then with the universe covered, you can figure out how to decide which ones are political. And if you keep track of the myriad referrals, from people, email, links, blogrolls, etc. then you’ll have a lot of information on popularity already, and can do other things like ask the owners for additional data. It doesn’t distinguish hypothesis formation from data collection, but as pioneers your first task is defining the problem and universe to examine. To limit the project, I suggest choosing a time-slice, so that at some point you’re open to taking retrospective data without counting every new blog added each day. And of course, keep us posted periodically please!

By: Rana

Rana — Wed, 26 May 2004 00:11:11 +0000

Maybe you could ask people to nominate their “top ten” political blogs, and cull from that group?

By: kevin

kevin — Tue, 25 May 2004 21:56:15 +0000

I don’t now much about their methodology, but Blogstreet has a “100 Most Influential” list. That would probably be another good place to start the weeding process.

By: David Weman

David Weman — Tue, 25 May 2004 20:59:33 +0000

By: decon

decon — Tue, 25 May 2004 19:58:33 +0000

Have you tried searching on vivismo? Their clustering methodolgy may help you a bit.

By: eszter

eszter — Tue, 25 May 2004 19:44:29 +0000

As I mentioned, the definition of what counts as a political blog is also up for discussion. It is certainly not restricted to blogs discussing “breaking news” only, nor is it restricted to blogs that only talk about political topics. So, for example, even though there’s much non-political content on CT, CT would still count because there are plenty of posts having to do with political issues. We haven’t yet decided what proportion of posts would have to do with political topics (again, broadly defined) in order for the blog to count as a political blog for our purposes.

By: Rana

Rana — Tue, 25 May 2004 19:02:59 +0000

How are you defining “political blog”? I ask, because I know a number of bloggers who regularly post on political topics, but either they do not do so exclusively, or the topics are political but not in the form of “breaking news.” (e.g. feministe)