Would you like politics with that?
Posted on: May 13, 2005 4:57 PM
Tonight I sat down at Encore Cafe to interview Pete Welsch - friend, collaborator, and wicked DJ. Over our cups of tea and our back to back laptops - his an Apple and mine from Sony - we talked political blogs while surfing the net on the free wireless.
Pete how did you get interested in political blogs?
I got interested in the early days with the Trent Lott business and the hype around Howard Dean's site. I was interested if the hype about political blogs was substantiated. Then I got started working with you, and the others, on BROG [Blog Research on Genre] and added method, as in methodology, to the madness.
So now you are researching and writing papers on political blogs. How many is that now?
Three on political blogs and then four papers with BROG. [NOTE: This is a significant amount of research publication for a Master's student. Some Ph.D. program somewhere will be very happy to land Pete for their program.]
Topics include?
My recent research looks at the relationship between political blogs and mainstream media. I'm using A-list blogs on both sides of the aisle, conservative and liberal. I'm interested in the differences in the social networks around the two types of blogs. In particular how often and what type of mainstream media do they link to for support of their opinions.Preliminary results show that conservative bloggers tent to link to each over with more central A-list blogs getting most attention. The relationship declines very quickly as the ranking falls. This creates a fairly hierarchical structure. Conversely liberal bloggers are linking more redundantly linked thereby creating a much flatter model. The conservative blogs tend to create an echo chamber where the same points reverberate. While the liberal blogs link to many more mainstream media sources. But this trend is changing with more liberal blogs becoming echoish. I should note that the echo chamber behavior is likely an artifact of the expanding set of blogs being tracked in the research. The early results were found from tracking Instapundit and Atrios, where as the later results are from tracking 20 A-list political blogs.
Tell us about your latest project?
I'm working on a program I'm calling Shelob - Shelob Helps Evaluate Links on Blogs. It will be released under a free software license. The program helps to evaluate the type of links found within blogs, thereby freeing up the researcher from making individual evaluations.
You and I have talked before about the mainstream media's characterization of political blogs as the only true blogs. Can you characterize those discussions for the readers?
I think that the press overplay the issue. If you telescope down through the blog phenomena you can find many other ways that writers can be expressing themselves beyond political blogs. The real issue is the intentionality of the writer. When you start a blog it is usually somewhat undefined, you don't settle into a genre until later. Sarah [Sarah Mecure, Pete's wife] and I have found that blogs are great ways to keep in touch with distant friends, mostly college pals.
What drives you crazy about the media's presentation of political blogs?
That would be the discussion of the "self-correcting capacity of blogs."Most of the press presents the idea that bloggers can quickly incorporate corrects into their posts by reacting to readers emails and comments, but the concept is completely unsubstantiated. In the case of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who was accused of taking money to blog in support of the Dean campaign, the accusation was untrue. I wonder how bloggers will react then the accusations are true. You can fire a journalist who has broken the code of ethics but what will become of bloggers that do so?
Thanks for talking to me today Pete. Keep working on your research and keep on blogging.
Pete Welsch blogs at Sampo: The Journal of Abundant Media and can also be found at SLIS Blogs.
Thanks for this Lois, it was really interesting. Someone emailed me the other day and had linked my blog as a liberal political source, which was quite flattering. I think the accountability thing is an issue. I always respond to comments and correct spelling and facts according to the readers (if they're right! see the 'no one' comment on my interview post). I wonder now if I shouldn't and just show myself up as a dummy...
Posted by: mimi at May 13, 2005 5:21 PM
It's amazing how those terms get thrown around isn't it, Mimi. Today's liberal is tomorrows conservative. LOL
Posted by: Lois at May 13, 2005 5:26 PM
brainy and legit!
Posted by: ritchey at May 13, 2005 5:17 PM