DGMS 2010 (ECREA 2010 Pre-Conference)

Tracing Publics in the Australian Blogosphere: New Methods for International Communication Research

Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Lars Kirchhoff, and Thomas Nicolai

• 12 Oct. 2010 – Doing Global Media Studies (ECREA 2010 Pre-Conference)

In recent years, a number of studies have developed more or less comprehensive maps of a range of national blogospheres: Adamic & Glance (2005) mapped the US political blogosphere against the backdrop of the 2004 presidential election campaigns, Kelly & Etling (2009) mapped the Iranian blogosphere, Linkfluence (2009) mapped the intersections between political bloggers in a number of major European countries in the lead-up to the EU parliament elections. A common feature of these studies was that they presented momentary snapshots of these blogospheres, and often focussed largely on explicitly political blogs. Moving beyond such limitations, it would be interesting to see, for example, how the Iranian blogosphere might have changed in the wake of the bloody conflicts following the country's disputed presidential elections, or how significant a role the discussion of EU politics might have assumed within the space of the overall blogospheres in various European nations.