Singapore.


The Friday at ICA 2010 starts with the first of two panels on online network mapping (I'll be presenting in the second one, later today). My brilliant PhD student Tim Highfield is the first presenter. His interest is in topical discussion networks in the French political blogosphere: such topical networks comprise sites commenting on specific events or issues, and the links between them. This observation comes out of a larger dataset collected over a longer period of time.

Singapore.


Finally we move on to Tom Bakker in his ICA 2010 session, who has undertaken a content analysis of political blogs by citizens. Tom notes that there are a variety of terms to describe this citizen journalism, and that political Weblogs still tend to be seen as an archetype for this field; hence the focus on Weblogs. Who are the people who start such blogs, and what are they doing? Is it really 'everybody', as Clay Shirky has said?

In the first place, though: how do we find them? Tom began by using five blog search engines (Google Blogsearch, Technorati, Blogpulse, Icerocket, and Truthlaidbear) to find active Dutch blogs authored by citizens; these were narrowed down to political blogs by examining how the blogger or blog described themselves, and by checking whether at least two of the last five posts dealt with political topics. For the Netherlands, this ultimately resulted in a list of some 163 blogs - so, hardly 'everybody', but actually a fairly small group.

Singapore.


The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Matthew Weber, who shifts our focus to online news and begins by noting the gradual decline of the traditional print news community and the rise of online news usage. Newspaper organisations - the news industry - form a community made up of individual populations of professionals, which compete with one another for users; within this, in turn, there are individual news organisations pursuing specific corporate strategies.

What effect does such strategy have over time? Strategic change can increase the likelihood of survival during periods of disruption; interorganisational linkages can provide economic and reputational benefits, and increase legitimacy; hyperlinks between organisations can be instrumental in this. News organisations make strategic choices on how to link and whom to link to; at times of change, this is a question especially of how to deal with new entrants.

Milwaukee.


The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2009 is Anatoliy Gruzd, whose focus is on the communities of blog readers, and how such communities of people discussing shared issues across different blogs may be discovered automatically - that is, how the social networks connecting them may be identified. This is important not least because of the massive growth in online information - we need to develop better tools to extract salient material from this overload of content, and to do so, knowing the social context is paramount.

Milwaukee.


The next presentation at AoIR 2009 is by Hallvard Moe, who begins by noting that the public sphere is still a useful concept It exposes us to expressions, opinions, and perspective we would not otherwise have chosen in advance, and provides a range of common experiences for citizens. But how do online media impinge on this - do they segment and polarise the public sphere (as suggested by people like Cass Sunstein), or provide more connections between and access to different ideas (as per Yochai Benkler's networked public sphere)?

Milwaukee.


The final speaker this morning at AoIR 2009 is my PhD student Tim Highfield, who focusses on the French blogosphere and uses much the same methodology as in our joint paper. His work focusses on a dataset of French blog and mainstream news media posts from some 450 sites throughout 2009, and out of this identifies what events and topics are driving discussion. Sites in his sample were identified through searches on relevant search engines as well as on specialist blog aggregators such as the French Linkfluence.

Overall, this particular study, which focusses on blogs, now takes in some 23000 posts from 148 active blogs over 221 days, out of some 165,000 posts when you also include the mainstream news media. Because the French political environment is multi-party, these blogs cluster into a number of groupings, rather than just a broad 'left' and 'right' category.

Milwaukee.


The next speakers in the blogging session at AoIR 2009 are Muhammad Abdul-Mageed and Priscilla Ringrose, whose focus is on war blogging. Such blogging addresses the exceptional communication demands during war situations, and war bloggers in warzones can meet these needs speedily and with authority. This also reflects a continuing shift in the media overall. The focus of this paper is on the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, where western media profiled (English-language) Israeli and Lebanese blogs.

So, the bloggers here belonged to two oppossing, warring nations,and espoused different ideological positions; how were they chosen and what positions do they reflect? What demographics, structural features, thematic, regional, and political positioning do they exhibit? According to which parameters were they selected? The study analysed all posts from 40 blogs (20 Israeli, 20 Lebanese) during the 34-day war in June and August 2006, which were found using search engines, media outlets, and blogs. Blogs had to be based in Lebanon or Israel, had to have at least five posts during the 34 days, had to be in English, had to have at least one hit in the global media, and had to be single- or group-authored rather than blog fora.