Politics and Blogging
My husband is very interested in politics so one ear in our liberal house is always tuned to a political discussion. Personally, I have less than zero tolerance for the “right” viewpoint. It seems that the “right” is winged out a bit and lacks leadership. Years ago, as an undergrad, I started as a political science major but switched to art history and now study Business Administration. Not exactly full circle but definitely non linear.
Recently, I ran across an interesting scholarly article that connects politics and blogging. This study applies Word Wide Web network theory to an examination of the community structure of the 2004 U.S. Democratic Presidential candidates John Kerry’s blog. The study used data mining to reveal strong similarities between candidate’s blog networks and Word Wide Web networks. Burstiness is comment activity during real-world campaigns. Blog networks are interpersonal communication devices.
For me, the main takeaways of this interesting article:
- There was little use of blogs before 2004 to engage citizens
- 2004 campaign introduced strong use of social software and was inspired by the unsuccessful primary campaign of Howard Dean
- Barak Obama used his senate blog and podcasts and campaigned successfully leveraging technology
- Blogs sidestep the mainstream media
- Network theory has its foundation in math graph theory and overlays the scalable theory of internet communication
- The world wide web is a scale free network which gains distinction from random networks
- Network theory is useful when applied to real word social networks, information networks, tech networks, and bio networks
- Patterns of linking structure exhibits a power law distribution which results in a smaller number of web pages having a great majority of inbound links
- Information is rapidly diffused via scale free networks
- Weak ties serve as bridges between diverse networks and network values scale exponentially
- The internet and blogs reengage citizens
- Cyberbalkanization (really cool word…but nothing in Wikipedia) is group polarization and the movement to more extra positions.
- Additional Reading
- Burstiness predicts states of network development
- A few blog users are responsible for a great percentage of comments
- Analysis of the Kerry Blog data included retrieving and storing data after the campaign blog went down and looking through code for time stamping, names, comments, etc.
- SQL uses robust macro analysis – this technique was employed to retrieve the data
- Power law applies the notion of early entrance and continuity
- Surface level burstiness maps to real world events – this a very significant finding
Run a search for author Sharon Meraz at http://www.allacademic.com
Meraz, Sharon. “Using Blogs to Extend the Public Sphere? Data Mining the John Kerry Candidate Blog for Networked Community Structure Dynamics” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress Centre, Dresden, Germany, 2009-02-05
MIT website | blogging about blogging | the power of metrics
Blogging began as a form of public/individual reflection. Savvy marketers realized blogging provided a new channel to communicate persuasively so the nature/purpose of this communication channel changed rapidly.
According to Wikipedia they are many different types of blogs:
- Corporate Blogs – enhance corporate communication. [ Google's Blog ]
- Genre Blogs – blogs which focus on a particular subject
[ Suing Google over Adsense ]
[ Oberman wants Scarborough fired] - Personal Blogs – ongoing diary or commentary
- Question Blogs – can use RSS syndication to convey answers
- Media Type Blogs -inserting media like photos, videos, etc.
- Device Type Blogs -defined by the device used to compose it…on my blackberry….maybe a microblog would be easier
What category/categories apply to BoingBoing, the world’s most popular blog?
What does blogging have to do with MIT’s website?
MIT Media Labs – launched the blogdex project to determine the social property of blogs. Visit MIT’s website. This site gets almost 2,000,000 unique visitors per month. The web team is really doing their job. MIT changes the home page daily. Is this is a case of breaking the rules once the rules are known?
This is what the site says about itself: The MIT web sites host more than 1,118,000 documents and receive more than 7,000,000 hits per day from all over the world. The image and background colors on the MIT home page change daily to call attention to each new spotlight. The MIT logo shown above is the graphical key to the background designs on the second-level pages. These pages use an enlarged and cropped logo as a background to bring together the categories of life at MIT. The MIT site is sponsored by Information Services & Technology (IS&T) and Public Relations Services (PRS).
Getting back to metrics. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Objective measurements are more valuable than subjective ones. Compete is a great analytical resource. I am taking some MBA courses at Southern Connecticut State University. Compete tells me that the design and content of the MIT site is more compelling than the design of the SCSU website. How? Simple! Compete proves it…metrically. This is information I could effectively use to influence policy within an organization.
More things for me to consider for the next few posts.
- Why Tags are important for advertising and promotion on the internet.
- Blogs are ranked by Technorati based on the number of incoming links….links are the roads of the internet.
- Mainstream journalists write blogs.
- There are Legal Liabilites and unforseen consequences of blogs.
- Blogs are harder to control than traditional media….leverage the lack of control.
- I learned something new today – MIT’s unique unit of measurement is the Smoot.
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