Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
  • Publication
    Locating the Australian Blogosphere: Towards a New Research Methodology
    ( 2008-07-25)
    Bruns, Axel
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    Wilson, Jason A.
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    Saunders, Barry J.
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    Highfield, Timothy J.
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    Kirchhoff, Lars
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    Nicolai, Thomas
  • Publication
    Investigating the Impact of the Blogosphere: Using PageRank to Determine the Distribution of Attention
    ( 2007-10-17)
    Kirchhoff, Lars
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    Bruns, Axel
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    Nicolai, Thomas
    Much has been written in recent years about the blogosphere and its impact on political, educational and scientific debates. Lately the issue has received significant attention from the industry. As the blogosphere continues to grow, even doubling its size every six months, this paper investigates its apparent impact on the overall Web itself. We use the popular Google PageRank algorithm which employs a model of Web use to measure the distribution of user attention across sites in the blogosphere. The paper is based on an analysis of the PageRank distribution for 8.8 million blogs in 2005 and 2006. This paper addresses the following key questions: How is PageRank distributed across the blogosphere? Does it indicate the existence of measurable, visible effects of blogs on the overall mediasphere? Can we compare the distribution of attention to blogs as characterised by the PageRank with the situation for other forms of web content? Has there been a growth in the impact of the blogosphere on the Web over the two years analysed here? Finally, it will also be necessary to examine the limitations of a PageRank-centred approach.
  • Publication
    Critical Voices in the Australian Political Blogosphere
    (Association of Internet Researchers, 2009-10-07)
    Bruns, Axel
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    Highfield, Timothy J.
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    Kirchhoff, Lars
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    Nicolai, Thomas
    This paper provides an update on an ongoing research project which maps and investigates the Australian political blogosphere, and expands on work presented at IR9.0 in Copenhagen (Bruns et al. 2008). The project is situated in a growing tradition of quantitative and mixed-method research into the shape and structure of national and international blogospheres (cf. e.g. Adamic & Glance, 2005; Kelly & Etling, 2008; and a number of the studies collected in Russell & Echchaibi, 2009), which utilise a combination of link crawling, data scraping, and network visualisation tools to map interconnections between blogs and analyse their contents. However, our work also addresses some of the limitations of these studies. First, we track blogging activity as it occurs, by scraping the content of new blog posts when they are announced through RSS feeds, rather than by crawling existing content in the blogosphere after the fact. Second, we utilise custom-made tools that distinguish between the different types of links and content found in blog sites and thus allow us to analyse only the salient discursive content provided by bloggers, without contaminating our data with static links and ancillary content. Finally, we are able to examine these better-quality data by using both link network mapping and textual analysis tools, to produce both cumulative longer-term maps of interlinkages and themes across the blogosphere, and specific shorter-term snapshots of current activity which indicate clusters of heavy interlinkage and highlight key themes and topics being discussed within these clusters in the wider network. This paper will document first outcomes from the second stage of this research project, tracking activity in the Australian blogosphere since the start of 2009. Against the baseline of quotidian activity we will identify periods of heightened blogging (and the leading drivers of such activity in the Australian political blogosphere) as measured by a number of core criteria: number of posts, length of posts, and number of incoming and outgoing links for blog posts. We will identify the core themes of conversation during such periods, and correlate them with domestic or international events covered in the mainstream media. This provides a first-hand account of the internal dynamics of the blogosphere. It enables us to profile key critical voices in the Australian political blogosphere, and to document the stability or volatility of their membership in the "A-list' of Australian blogging. It also provides insight into questions about the relationship between niche and mainstream media, by indicating whether key themes in the blogosphere closely follow those in the news media, or whether bloggers are preoccupied a set of topics that is considerably detached from current political debates. Finally, we will also be able to examine the extent to which the Australian political blogosphere is divided into a number of standing clusters, or to which such clusters form and dissolve over time as political debate moves through different themes and topics. For better or for worse, 2009 provides an excellent context for this research. Our project has already captured domestic blogger coverage of international events such as the inauguration of US president Barack Obama and the growing efforts to contain the threat of a global economic recession, as well as discussion of national political events. Although unpredictable due to the peculiarities of Australian electoral law (which enables sitting premiers to call an election well before the regular end of the legislative period), it is also likely that there will be at least two state or territory elections during 2009.
  • Publication
    Australia's Political Blogosphere in the Aftermath of 2007
    ( 2008-10-15)
    Bruns, Axel
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    Wilson, Jason A.
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    Saunders, Barry J.
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    Kirchhoff, Lars
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    Nicolai, Thomas
  • Publication
    Monitoring the Australian Blogosphere through the 2007 Australian Federal Election
    ( 2009-10-08)
    Nicolai, Thomas
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    Kirchhoff, Lars
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    Bruns, Axel
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    Highfield, Timothy J.
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    Flew, Terry
    Mainstream and niche online media have played an important role in recent election campaigns both in Australia and abroad. The new US president's social network my.barackobama.com alone is reported to have attracted more than 1.5 million members during the drawn-out US campaign season (Stirland 2008), and Obama is likely to attempt to utilise this network of supporters (which exists at arms' length from Democrat party organisations) as leverage in the difficult political negotiations ahead. The Australian election campaign of 2007 similarly saw widespread - if perhaps somewhat less sophisticated or successful - use of Facebook, YouTube, and home-grown sites such as Kevin07, and the Rudd Labor government has begun to explore the use of department blogs for citizen consultation (see e.g. Bruns 2008a for an early analysis). The role in these campaigns of third-party commentary and analysis Websites, ranging from partisan bloggers to bipartisan citizen journalism sites and from campaign reporting to issues analysis, should also be stressed. Well-known political bloggers in the United States, such as Ariana Huffington or Ann Coulter, were frequently called upon as pundits in televised discussions, while a number of Australian bloggers had part- or full-time roles in the print and online media - Larvatus Prodeo's Mark Bahnisch, for example, was a commenter for New Matilda and Crikey, and Road to Surfdom's Tim Dunlop operated Blogocracy as one of News Ltd.'s in-house blogger/commenters. At the same time, the blogosphere also successfully provided an important corrective to mainstream news reporting, and a number of specialist bloggers rose to significant prominence as a result of their work - perhaps the best example for this trend has been the emergence of psephologist blogs such as Possums Pollytics, The Poll Bludger, or Mumble as fixtures of Australian political analysis. During the campaign, a well-publicised running feud between commentators in The Australian and the pseph-bloggers over the veracity of The Australian's analysis of polling results highlighted political blogging's challenge to the mainstream media's opinion leadership (see e.g. Bruns 2008b/c), while post-election, both Pollytics and Poll Bludger found a permanent home in Crikey's stable of independent political commentators. In spite of the increasing visibility of political blogging and other social media practices in such recent political campaigns, however, clear evidence documenting the real impact of these phenomena remains hard to come by. Four years later, Adamic & Glance's observation from the 2004 US presidential campaign that the blogosphere was deeply divided into "red' and "blue' camps which only rarely interconnected with one another may no longer apply, partly also due to the impact of many other social networking tools which serve to interconnect these political blogging networks at least indirectly; today, a much more mature blogosphere combined with tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, and other social networks may mean that active online users are exposed to a far greater variety of political news and commentary than previously. Fundamental questions which arise from such considerations are these: how does information travel across the political blogosphere and its ancillary networks? Who are the central nodes in this network of practitioners, and to what extent do they act as influencers and opinion leaders, perhaps even in a traditional framework as articulated by Katz & Lazarsfeld (1955)? Due to the digital nature of blog-based communication, such questions can now be approached at a new level of scale and detail, using mixed quantitative and qualitative approaches: where previous research had to extrapolate from limited case studies, it is now becoming possible to use large-scale datagathering tools to cover national blogospheres virtually in their entirety (see e.g. Kelly & Etling's study of the Iranian blogosphere, 2008). Exploring these possibilities, this paper reports on early findings from the first stage in a larger pro-ject to investigate the shape and internal dynamics of the Australian political blogosphere. This first stage tracked the activities of some 230 political blogs and related Websites in Australia from 2 No-vember 2007 (the final month of the federal election campaign, with the election itself taking place on 24 November) to 24 January 2008. In an effort to generate high-quality data, we improved upon the tools for data-gathering used by earlier research projects, focussing specifically on the content of blog posts rather than including the entire contents of blog pages in our analysis or focussing only on mapping the networks of hyperlinks contained in such pages. We harvested more than 65,000 articles for this study. Where previous papers from this project have discussed this methodology (Bruns et al. 2008a) or investigated the thematic preoccupations of leading political bloggers (Bruns et al. 2008b), in the present paper we will examine the observable patterns of content creation by Australian bloggers during the 2007 election and its aftermath, thereby providing insight into the level and nature of activity in the Australian political blogosphere during that time. The performance indicators which are identified through this process enable us to target for further in-depth research, to be reported in subsequent papers, those individual blogs and blog clusters showing especially high or unusual activity as compared to the overall baseline.
  • Publication
    Network and Concept Maps for the Blogosphere
    (Online Publishing, 2008-05-01)
    Bruns, Axel
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    Kirchhoff, Lars
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    Nicolai, Thomas
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    Wilson, Jason A.
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    Saunders, Barry J.
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    Highfield, Timothy J.
    While qualitative evidence for the networked patterns of discussion, debate, and deliberation in the blogosphere is readily available, it is more difficult to establish a solid quantitative picture of blog-based topical discussion networks and their cluster patterns. Large numbers of blogs (and individual blog posts, links, and comments) are likely to be involved in a quantitative study of blog-based discussion patterns. Hence, automated data collection and analysis is necessary.
  • Publication
    Mapping the Australian Political Blogosphere
    (Web Science Research Initiative, University of Southampton, 2009-03-18)
    Bruns, Axel
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    Kirchhoff, Lars
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    Nicolai, Thomas
    The blogosphere allows for the networked, decentralised, distributed discussion and deliberation on a wide range of topics. Based on their authors' interests, only a subset of all blogs will participate in any one topical debate. Even within such debates, there will be an uneven distribution of participation based on a variety of sociocultural factors: - the time available for any individual blogger to participate, - the blogger's level of interest in the topic, - the blogger's awareness of other blogs discussing the topic (which they link and respond to), - the blogger's status amongst their peers (which may determine how aware others are of the blog, and thus whether they will read, comment on, link to, or respond to the blogger's posts), - the quality of the blogger's writing and contributions, - the blogger's specific interests in the topic (which may lead them to focus on particular aspects of the wider topic), - and additional factors including the blogger's political ideology, gender, age, location, sociodemographic status (to the extent that these are evident from the blog), as well as the language they write in. In combination, these factors mean that networked debate on specific topics in the blogosphere is characterised by clustering (Barabási, Albert & Jeong, 1999; Newman, Watts & Strogatz, 2002; Watts, 1999). For any one topic, there are likely to be one or multiple clusters of highly active and closely interlinked blogs, surrounded by a looser network of blogs which are less active contributors to the debate and are less densely linked to it. Individual clusters in the topical debate may be able to be distinguished according to certain factors: for example, their topical specialisation (focussing on specific sub-topics of the wider debate) or their shared identity (e.g. a common national, ethnic, or ideological background). Such blog-based debate is difficult to conceptualise under the general terms of the Habermasian public sphere model (which as formulated depends on the existence of a dominant mass media to ensure that all citizens are able to be addressed by it; see Habermas 2006); at a smaller level, however, it may be possible to understand networked discussion on specific topics in the blogosphere to constitute what may be described as a public spherule (Bruns, 2008). Rather than seeing networked political debate in terms of the operations of a public sphere, we can think about a group of topical discussion clusters of sufficient size and interconnection providing a substitute for their participants. It may be that when layered on top of one another, the public spherules on various topics of public interest can stand in as a replacement for the conventional public sphere (whose existence is undermined by the decline of the mass media as mass media; see (Castells, 2007). This networked public sphere would necessarily be more decentralised than the conventional, Habermasian model of the public sphere. Our project aims to develop a rigorous and sound methodology for the study of this networked public sphere.
  • Publication
    Challenges of Tracking Topical Discussion Networks Online
    (SAGE Publications, 2011-08)
    Highfield, Timothy J.
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    Kirchhoff, Lars
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    Nicolai, Thomas
    Attempts to map online networks, representing relationships between people and sites, have covered sites including Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. However, the predominant approach of static network visualization, treating months of data as a single case rather than depicting changes over time or between topics, remains a flawed process. As different events and themes provoke varying interactions and conversations, it is proposed that case-by-case analysis would aid studies of online social networks by further examining the dynamics of links and information flows. This study uses hyperlink analysis of a population of French political blogs to compare connections between sites from January to August 2009. Themes discussed in this period were identified for subsequent analysis of topic-oriented networks. By comparing static blogrolls with topical citations within posts, this research addresses challenges and methods in mapping online networks, providing new information on temporal aspects of linking behaviors and information flows within these systems.
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    Scopus© Citations 11