Political Blogging in Australia

Boston.
In addition to the various vodcast-based means of staying up to date with political developments in Australia and the world even while in the sadly news-starved U.S., I'm also a regular reader of Larvatus Prodeo at the moment - one of the most consistently insightful Australian political group blogs. (The Prodeans are having a great deal of fun at the expense of the Canberra press gallery punditariat at the moment - very enjoyable.)

So, in that context it's very timely that my article on mapping the Australian political blogosphere using the IssueCrawler research tool has just been published in First Monday. This analyses my David Hicks case study, some of the outcomes of which I've published here in the past, with a particular view to outlining possible methodological opportunities combining IssueCrawler and Technorati. I'm very grateful to Edward Valauskas and the First Monday team for turning the article around so quickly - beats print journals any time...

This article is something of a stepping stone to the chapter on the Australian political blogosphere which Debra Adams and I have proposed for the Accented Blogging collection (and which we're currently writing). There are plenty more opportunities for applying network research using IssueCrawler and similar tools to the study of blogs, of course - I'm also interested in exploring the use of additional technologies such as Yahoo! Pipes (as a means of pre-filtering the crawl seeds, for example) and IBM's exciting Many Eyes visualisation tools, which Josh Green put me on to the other day (for further interactive visualisation of the crawl results). If anyone else is working in this area, I'd love to hear from you...

Technorati : Australia, First Monday, IssueCrawler, Larvatus Prodeo, blogs, politics, research
Del.icio.us : Australia, First Monday, IssueCrawler, Larvatus Prodeo, blogs, politics, research