Journal of Information Technology & Politics v.4, n.3 "Political Blogs: Transmission Belts, Soapboxes, Mobilizers or Conversation Starters?" Author: Kevin Wallsten Abstract This paper makes an initial attempt to situate political blogging alongside other forms of political participation by asking the question: how do political bloggers actually use their blogs? More specifically, this paper relies on a detailed content analysis of 5,000 less popular and 5,000 A-list political blog posts over the course of the 2004 campaign in order to determine whether political bloggers use their blogs primarily as "soapboxes," "transmission belts," "mobilizers," or "conversation starters." The results presented here suggest that although political blogs are used to make opinion statements far more often than they are used to mobilize political action, to request feedback from readers, or to pass along information produced by others, blog use changes significantly in response to key political events. To be more precise, less popular political bloggers were significantly more likely to mobilize political action on Election Day, and all bloggers—regardless of popularity—showed a greater propensity to seek feedback from their readers on the days of the presidential debates and in the weeks immediately following the election. Political blogging, in short, is a complex form of political participation that blends hypertext links, opinionated commentary, calls to political action, and requests for feedback in different ways at different moments in time. On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 1:45 PM, stefania vicari <s.vicari@reading.ac.uk> wrote:
Hi! Please, can anyone suggest any literature on blog analysis? I mean to apply frame analysis on a set of subject-related blogs but I would like to have some more background.
Thanks! stefania -- Stefania Vicari Visiting PhD student Emory University Department of Sociology 1555 Dickey Drive, Suite 225 Atlanta, GA 30322 U.S.A.
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-- Dr. Stuart W. Shulman Assistant Professor Department of Political Science University of Massachusetts Amherst http://people.umass.edu/stu/ stu@polsci.umass.edu Editor, Journal of Information Technology & Politics http://www.jitp.net Director, QDAP-UMass http://people.umass.edu/stu/QDAP-UMass/ Associate Director, National Center for Digital Government http://www.umass.edu/digitalcenter/