just a quick comment from me by way of follow-up - mainly on Ken’s comment. Ken’s right, of course - I haven’t as yet responded in any detail to some of the comments and criticisms raised by him and others. Largely, that’s simply to do with the fact that we’re in the middle of week one of the new semester - and as the only one of us three who also has active teaching duties this year, this requires my full attention for the moment. I hope to follow up in some more detail next week or so (and in fact I’ve been planning to post something here on the benefits and limitations of the network mapping approach for some time).

For now, a few things that may be worth pointing out in reply to Ken’s comments: yes, as I mentioned I’ve done a number of follow-up crawls on various issues after the David Hicks study, on topics which could be considered as ‘owned’ by both sides of politics. In March 2007, for example, I looked at the Brian Burke controversy (an issue which at that time was driven very strongly by commentators on the right, but ultimately backfired); from March through to May, I did weekly crawls on WorkChoices (which I would say was hotly discussed on both sides of the fence).

I haven’t written articles about all of these (and can’t release some of the articles I have written before the print publications they’re in are published), but as I mentioned in my post on my own blog, the network maps resulting from these crawls can all be viewed on the IssueCrawler site, and I’d encourage people to view and interpret them for themselves. (You will have to work through the less than optimal IssueCrawler Web interface, though.)

Obviously, the ‘ownership’ of each issue that is selected for a case study necessarily skews the results; across the issues I studied, I can’t say I found major differences in my results, however (and I would consider at least the Burke controversy to be owned more by the right than the left at that point in time - others may disagree). There is perhaps an overarching problem in that (as Possum documented in his analysis of the Crosby-Textor materials a few months ago) during much of 2007, there were very few issues solidly owned by the right - and some of them didn’t lend themselves easily to the type of analysis we’re talking about (issuecrawling approaches require relatively distinct keywords, so terms such as ‘economy’ or ‘experience’ don’t work particularly well, while ‘David Hicks’ or ‘Brian Burke’ do). The change of government may provide us with an opportunity to see whether there will be a role reversal in the blogosphere as well. There are a few other questions around the network mapping methodology, of course (and I do raise some of them in the article published in First Monday), but I’ll address them in a more substantial post later. Jason has already indicated some possible solutions and extensions of this approach which add a qualitative dimension, anyway.

A couple of other points which I would like to make here, though: first, while rigour and accountability are important in each case, I would have thought everyone understood the differences in register between academic publications (such as my First Monday article on the David Hicks issue), opinion pieces (such as our Club Bloggery series for ABC Online), and posts on group and personal blogs. I don’t think there’s much wrong with being a little polemic in an opinion piece, and even more so in a personal blog post - and I would think that at least in our collectively authored series, we have sufficiently identified statements of opinion _as_ opinion (where we haven’t, readers of these pieces have disagreed, sometimes vocally). The lack of distinction on some comments here and elsewhere between our academic work (and the scholarly publications resulting from it), our Club Bloggery series on ABC Online, this group blog, and the post on my personal site which reignited this debate, has genuinely surprised me.

Second, then, to answer Ken’s final question - was my post on Snurblog ill-advised? In hindsight, yes, probably - ignoring the flaming, sleeping on it, and outlining more clearly the research upon which our views are based (and its limitations) would have been the smarter choice. That said, I don’t think I’ll be the first or last to respond in kind to being provoked - I think it’s been, oh, some 20 years since I was last involved in a flamewar, and I didn’t recognise the flamebait for what it was. To be honest, I don’t think it will much change what I say on Snurblog, and how I say it, but I’ll certainly be more careful in pointing out whether I speak on my own behalf, on behalf of us three, or on behalf of the wider research teams and organisations I belong to.

Of course, readers come out in the open when they link from their own blogs, or when they comment on blogs. Links… well we’ve covered that in enough depth for the moment. Comments, though, we could approach in various ways.

We could use the lens of individual blogs, take some sample of their active life, and look at the comments in relation to a series of posts. If you wanted to do simple content analysis, you could mark out a matrix including factors like ’supportive’, ‘critical’, ‘unrelated’ ‘reply to poster’ ‘reply to commenter’ etc. etc. You could also mark it by username etc. You could then even think about categorising it according to ite apparent ideological bias, but that’s when you’d risk the charge of some arbitrariness. Anyway, looked at from various angles (time, by post, by topic etc.) that might provide you with some kind of overview…

There are other things we’re working with like Leximancer, which actually analyses the frequency and concurrence of particular words and phrases across individual blogs, and between them, too. You never know, this kind of analysis might even address some of Laura’s criticisms - it can easily be applied to blogs that aren’t linky, but possibly show how their stuff has been picked up across other blogs.

There are other, probably more satisfying and finer-grained things you could do alongside that. Interviews with the bloggers themselves, and even with ’super-contributors’ like high-frequency commenters will always tell you a lot. But using your eyes and reading specific threads to find out how conversations develop is another thing. It’s hard to “write up” in any simple way, and it draws on the humanities skills of textual analysis etc…

All of this is do-able, and I think that we all see it as a logical next step. I’m jut happy that we have the opportunity to do this stuff at all.

For example, to what extent do commenters (and bloggers) engage with each other mostly as part of an exercise in confirmation bias? Is there any significant Habermas-ian “communicative rationality” element? Does formation and maintenance of strong “community” necessarily exclude or place major limits on widely differing values/ideologies among group members, in cyberspace as in meatspace?

One thing that it’s made clear for me is that one must be careful about the connections one makes between research and other forms of writing that one does. You’re right to point out that we ought perhaps to have taken greater care in all of this. I think this issue is particularly challenging for us because so much that we do is mixed up with the area we’re actually studying. But I’ll certainly be keeping it in mind in future.

The main reason I wrote this long post was to clarify some of the underlying questions that animate the research. I think that you’re in sympathy with most of the questions, and elements of the methods we’re using to address them, but think we’ve drawn some hasty conclusions at times. I’m prepared to own that, but I’ll also say that the conversation on Troppo has revealed how deep some of the difficulties are with answering the questions we’re interested in - something else I tried to address in this post.

Anyway, once again, I hope you’ll continue to follow the research with interest. Thanks for your positive comments on its value.

- You have no data at all to suggest that lefty blogs have any influence in Australian politics, let alone a lot of influence like Kos clearly has in the US.

- You have no data of any worth to suggest that lefty blogs tend to be more community-based than righty ones?

If we agreed on that this would go much more smoothly, I think.

Also, in response to this:

But how to explain the difference between the groups, if, as you say, they’re likely to be different?

I would say that you would explain it the way Ken has - by pointing out that on the net as in real life different communities form around different issues as a function of different preferences. Ie nothing to do with inherent predilections based on political preferences.

In relation to which, I actually thought that the academic research tended (with limited reliability imho) to show that lefties were more likely to be sad loners whilst righties were far more into community.

This is generally presented as: lefties are more likely to be independently-minded critical challengers of the status quo whilst righties are more likely to be conformist sheep, but the gist is the same regardless of which lens you use.

You are not changing lenses, you are positing a completely different thesis. in relation this research see eg Tyler Cowen.

I note a passing reference in Bruns’ mapping paper referring to subsequent exercises claimed to be confirmatory of the results of the Hicks cluster mapping. However, even if that’s the case, the significance of such results may well depend on the nature of the issue being studied and mapped (as I suggested). One cannot validly draw general conclusions about strength of “community” or “influence” on a comparative ideological basis (as you have done with varying degrees of stridency in various documents) without taking account of the extent to which the issue you’re mapping is likely to be one that is “owned” by or engages the attention of a particular part of the ideological spectrum.

In that sense I agree that it’s unavoidable to an extent to engage in some left-right dichotomising. I don’t have a problem with that either (unlike some other Troppo commenters) as long as you keep the limitations of that dichotomy always in view. I think you all to some extent, and Axel specifically in his most recent blog post, tended to lose sight of those limitations.

That said, I would be interested in seeing the results of a link mapping exercise of an issue putatively “owned” by the right (like the ones I suggested). However, even if it showed a less tight clustering among a relatively small group of Australian right-leaning blogs than was the case with the Hicks issue (as it may well), that would not allow a conclusion that the “right” blogosphere has a less developed sense of community. It may just mean that the “community” for those bloggers is more of a global village of the like-minded. It was the value-laden adjectival characterisations and assumptions in your article/s and posts that got Blair’s hackles up, I think, and I agree with him to some extent.

I think those general claims (influence and better developed community) are both dubious and counterproductive, given that further interpretation and pursuit of your research will require constructive interaction with inter alia the bloggers who have just been gratuitously sledged. I should, however, note that the really counterproductive blog post to which I reacted and posted about, was written by Axel Bruns and not yourself or Barry Saunders. I’m interested in the fact that Axel has not to date participated in this discussion. Does he accept that his post was at the very least ill-advised?