Networks of Political Blogging in Greece

Krems.
The final speaker in this CeDEM 2011 session is Kostas Zafiropoulos, whose interest is in political blogging in Greece. He describes Greek blogs as a self-organising community, and begins by showing the well-known image from Adamic & Glance’s study of the US political blogosphere around the 2004 election (which, analysing the patterns of interlinking between blogs, showed a highly polarised environment at the time).

Kostas’s project undertook a similar study for Greece. They began by using Technorati to find Greek political blogs (with “some” authority, according to Technorati’s measures), and tagged them according to their political orientation. During May 2009, they identified some 101 blogs through this process.

Five clusters of blogs became apparent through this research: one central cluster of sites accounted for 61%, but had a very low number of incoming links; another cluster comprising 18% of all sites was aligned with the left-wing parties KKE and SYRIZA; 8% of blogs were aligned with PASOK; 9% were more generally leftist, and 4% were leftist with a focus on digital liberties. (If I understand correctly, there were no clusters of blogs aligned with the conservative side; I assume conservative blogs are all in the large amorphous cluster?) The latter three clusters are also all closely interlinked with one another; this is true especially for the last two. So, there is no strong polarisation, at least amongst these largely left-of-centre clusters themselves.

Further, the project undertook a content analysis of the four specific clusters; blogs were coded for the presence of a number of key themes. Generally, clusters were found to address just over half of the 12 topics identified by the researchers; information provision, campaigning, electioneering and concern creation were the key themes they addressed.

This picture of the key content focus of each cluster was also correlated with the linkage patterns; perhaps unsurprisingly, the two most closely interlinked clusters also had the greatest overlap in themes, and there generally was a good correlation between linking and thematic choices.

What will be necessary in the future will be to locate key central blogs in each cluster and to explore the association of these central blogs with linkage and content patterns. Overall, though, what emerges from this research already is that there is a relatively small level of polarisation in the Greek blogosphere, though.