Marketing Holistics

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

June 15, 2009 - Posted by barbarareiner | just for fun | burstiness, cyberbalkanization, data mining, john kerry, political blogs