“Karine Barzilai-Nahon”:http://ekarine.org/ sent along these new papers of note:
“Democracy.com: A Tale of Political Blogs and Content”:http://ekarine.org/wp-admin/pub/DemocracyDotCom.pdf
bq. The debate about the role of political blogs in politics generally and its effect on democracy and participation in particular has deepened since the 2008 U.S. presidential election. While some studies warn that the Internet may undermine deliberation, and replicate patterns of homophily and polarization among blogs with the same political inclination, other studies emphasize the potential of the Internet to strengthen cross-ideological discourse and participation. This paper suggests, using a hybrid theoretical framework which acknowledges homophily and the power law distribution among political blogs, and at the same time exhibits the use of the Internet also as a cross-participation platform and as strengthening participation. For that purpose, this paper looks at 83 videos that went viral during the 2008 election and examines patterns of behavior of the top 50 political blogs (conservative and liberal) in respect these videos over a period of two years.
“The Place of Blogs in the Life Cycle of Viral Political Information”:http://ekarine.org/wp-admin/pub/FifteenMinutesOfFame.pdf
bq. This study addresses dynamics of viral information in the blogosphere, and is interested in empirically understanding how blogs play a role in the virality process. More specifically, we develop a new methodology that creates a map of the ‘life cycle’ of blogs posting links to viral information. Our dataset focuses on the linking practices of blogs to the most significant viral videos of the 2008 US presidential election. To do so, we gathered data on all blogs (n=9,765) and their posts (n=13,173) linking to 65 of the top US presidential election videos that became viral on the Internet during the period between March 2007 and June 2009. Among other things, our findings illuminate the importance of different types of blogs: elite, top-political, top-general and tail blogs. We also found that while elite and top-general blogs create political information, they drive and sustain the viral process, whereas top-political and tail blogs act as followers in the process.
Here is one bit from the first paper, which is consistent with some other findings about linkage patterns in the political blogosphere:
bq. We find that homophily exists within the two ideological camps; that is, liberals tend to link one set of videos, while conservatives tend to link the other. While this finding is significant, we also note that some cross-political inclination linking occurs. In these cases, the videos tend to have content that can be used for either side. We also find that a bandwagon effect exists which means that the popularity of a video (as represented by number of views) will have an effect on the likelihood that blogs will link to that popular content.