the online times

8/3/2019 The Online Times

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The Online Times

Have Network Patterns in the Political Blogosphere

Changed as Web Technology Evolves

Karl Murray O'Doherty

The thesis is submitted to University College Dublin in part fulfilment of the

requirements for the degree of Master of International Media and Conflict.

UCD Clinton Institute of American Studies

Supervised by Dr. Marisa Ronan.

August 2010

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Blogs 8

1.1 Blogs: History and their Uses 9

1.2 What Constitutes a Blog 11

1.3 Blogs, the 'Old' Media, and Influence 12

Chapter Two: Networks 17

2.1 The Ideological Divide 18

2.2 Networks and Communities 21

2.3 Community Boundaries 23

Chapter Three: Results 25

3.1 Network Graphs 26

3.2 Tables of Results 28

Chapter Four: Discussion 34

4.1 Expected Results Compared to Actual Results. 35

Conclusions 37

Bibliography 39

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Abstract

Technological advances were necessary in order for blogging to take off. There are now

millions of people world wide who blog, though only a small percentage of them get an

audience for what they write. Political blogging has grown to be a highly influential force in

the United States in both the media as well as the political system itself. It owes its strength to

the individual members of the collective blogosphere who link together and share news,

sources and information to offer the media consuming public a trustworthy alternative to

traditional media. There is a great ideological divide in the U.S. political blogosphere betweenconservatives and progressives, and it is the nature of this divide that spurs much heated

debate and discussion. The aim of this thesis is to map the network created by these individual

bloggers of the political blogosphere in the U.S. and discover how strongly interconnected the

various blogs and websites are. Evolutions in web and mobile technology will be used to try

and explain the differences, if any, found in comparing the network map produced by other

researchers in the field, and the results of this thesis.

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Acknowledgement

I owe my greatest debt of thanks to Dr. Marisa Ronan, my thesis supervisor. Without her

guidance and suggestions it is doubtful if I would have ever started, let alone completed this

work. All my thanks Dr. Ronan, for putting up with my terrible thesis writing skills.

Thanks also to Laura, someone else who made it possible for me to finish. Thank you for

when you entertained me when I was bored and when you made me work if I was lazy. I

know I can't have been easy to life with during the time it took to write this thesis, so thankyou too to Dan, for putting up with my nonsense and for letting me bounce ideas off him.

You've helped a fantastic amount, thank you.

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Introduction

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This thesis will map the network of interactions between politically conservative and

politically progressive blogs as they deal with the debate over healthcare in the U.S., a

massive topic that engaged every section of the American public. The main focus of the thesis

is not to qualitatively assess the coverage of the issue, rather to use the data on how the blogs

interact to study the network they create. Blogs are going to form the basis for the thesis, as

they are a visible, evolving, inclusive and virtually limitless form of expression available to

nearly everybody in the U.S. The etiquette and conventions that surround blogging make it a

unique medium through which to study patterns of human interaction. How dense the

ideological network is, or how much inter-ideological linking there is has implications for the

visibility or prominence of different political ideologies (Ackland 2005, 2). This thesis seeks

to continue and modernise research carried out previously in the area, in light of rapid

technological advances that directly affect how people use blogs.

An understanding of the key terms and how they will be used is necessary to

understand the research. A network consists of a group of elements, or nodes, that are

connected to each other. Networks are how information travels and people interact, and

studying networks is important to understand the power of a group, or their weaknesses. With

this thesis, the individual blogs shall be the nodes and the links from one to another are their

connections. This is the main focus of the thesis, and chapter two will discuss their

importance in both an online and offline capacity. A very basic primary definition of what

constitutes a blog is that they are a subset of all websites, commentaries posted in diary form,

with the most recent entry listed first (Tremayne et al. 2006, 290). The term 'blog', short for

'weblog' will be further defined and explained in chapter one. Visualising the network is

essential to understanding how it works, the results of a content analysis will be graphed on a

network graph to show how densely connected the network is. Blogs and the collective

'blogosphere' offer a rather unique opportunity to study how networks form and function due

to the nature of the data (constantly and rapidly changing to reflect real world activities rather

than appearing fully formed or slow to evolve like a cell network or transport infrastructure).

There is a visible hostility between some sections of the politically conscious public of

the U.S., both online and offline. Looking at the way that divide is expressed through a

medium such as a blog or the network of blogs, is a way to see how much interaction and

debate takes place between the two ideologically opposed sides. With online political blogs

the main, and most visible divide, is that of the one between groups identifying as

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'Conservative' and 'Progressive'. In the U.S., conservative ideology speaks to those who want

to see a smaller role played by the federal government in all aspects of rule, they are

supportive of individualism, capitalism, deregulation, free market economy and most

importantly for this thesis, they were staunchly opposed to the healthcare reform bill that was

passed in March 2010. Progressives are on the other side of the divide. Generally they are

described as being in favour of a social welfare system, support government involvement in

the economy in the form of semi-state bodies etc. and support social change that benefits

society as a whole rather than the conservative ideology of individualism. The two terms are

difficult to define and carry with them a long philosophical history and different meanings.

For this thesis though, the broad characteristics mentioned will suffice, as they follow the

spirit of the blogs that they represent.

There are other ideologies for example 'Libertarian', which share views from both

sides but are still separate. Conservative and progressive are the two most visible ideologies

online, and form the list of the most read political blogs. To show divisiveness in the

blogosphere, only those two ideological sides shall be analysed. Without a qualitative study of

cross-ideological links, an accurate picture of how the two separate spheres interact would not

be available. The analysis of the blogs in this thesis will therefore include a qualitative aspect

to try and illustrate this divisiveness by noting the nature and frames of the cross-ideological

links, for example whether the link is included because the poster agrees with their cross-

ideological counterpart, or is possibly insulting them. The nature of the divide, and the

different types of links used, will be discussed further in chapter two.

The reason for using the debate in the political blogosphere over healthcare reform is

that it guarantees a large number of posts on the subject, and therefore a large sample group to

give an accurate picture of how the blogs interact and this, the form of the network. With a

less popular topic, there is a possibility that there would not be enough raw material to create

a proper data set from and the study would not be an accurate portrayal of interaction. A

similar study by Tremayne et al. (2006) used the discussion of the Iraq war to assess the

network, with satisfactory results. It was anticipated that the results of the content analysis on

the political blogs would show broad similarities to those displayed by previous research

(Adamic and Glance 2005; Tremayne et al. 2006; Hargittai et al. 2008; Ackland 2005), in that

there will be a clear divide between the two ideological communities. Going by the previous

research also, it was expected that the patterns of linking to other blogs and old media

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sources would change to reflect a growing preference for blogs and non-traditional elite

commentary, especially among the conservative side. As the results show though, this hasn't

happened. There are of course other elements apart from technology that can inspire change,

and without a proper qualitative assessment of the blogs themselves, and their publishers and

audience, concrete assessment cannot be made about the reasons behind shifting patterns.

Using the previous research, and predictions based in patterns of the network, it is hoped to

show that some percentage of change can be attributed to technological advancements.

For the purposes of looking at the network of the blogs, the top 25 conservative and

top 25 progressive blogs concerning themselves with U.S. politics shall be used. The reason

only the top 25 will be used, even though lesser ranking blogs are influential too, is because

of the skewed distribution of popularity that has been found to exist in blogs: Because of thisdistribution, a few elite blogs can operate as both an information aggregator and as a

summary statistic for the blogosphere (Drezner and Farrell 2008, 17). This unbalance, and

the mechanics behind the formation of the ranking system, shall be addressed in chapter two.

Table 1. shows the blogs used in the thesis for analysis. The BAI figure in the middle

is their rank respective of their own network, be they conservative or progressive. The

italicised number beside each blog, is their rank with the two sides combined. Results are

given to either include or exclude the data from the website Memeorandum.com, as the posts

were not indicative of any ideological bent, and the website has no blogging content on it,

only large amounts of links to other blogs. This is a news and blog aggregation website rather

than a proper blog.

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Table 1. Top U.S. political blogs as determined by the Blogosphere Authority Index. 25 July, 2010. (available at

blogosphereuthorityindex.com)

The data set for the blogs as they are would be huge, and beyond the scope of this

thesis. Instead, the network will be looked at as the blogosphere discusses a major event that

engages all parts of the political spectrum. The debate over the Obama administration's plans

for healthcare ignited fierce debate, much of it dependant on blind ideology rather than

discussion of the facts of the proposed legislation. This is a situation similar to that studied by

Tremayne et al. in 2006, when they mapped the network of blogs using the Iraq war to set

their boundaries. Similar methodology to Hargittai et al. (2008) will be used to get the

individual blog posts for analysis. Internal, or links directed at another page on the same site,

were not counted. A sample of the blog's postings will be taken on various dates and from

those dates, posts discussing the healthcare reform bill and its possible consequences will be

selected. The sampling of the blogs will be taken from between the period starting the 6th of

June 2009, when President Obama announced in his weekly address his intentions to reform

the healthcare system of the U.S., and ending on the 24th of March 2010, the day after the bill

was signed into law. A search for the keywords Healthcare Reform performed on Lexis

5

1 1 4

2 2 5

3 3 9

5 4 12

7 5 157 6 16

10 7 17

11 8 19

13 9 23

14 10 25

18 11 27

20 12 31

21 13 32

22 14 35

24 15 36

26 16 39

28 17 42

29 18 4330 19 44

33 20 45

34 21 46

36 22 46

38 23 48

39 24 49

39 25 50

Progressive BlogsCombined Rank

BAIRank

Conservative BlogsCombined Rank

Huffington Post Hot Air

DailyKos Big Government

Talking Points Memo Newsbusters

Firedoglake Ace Of Spades HQ

America Blog American Thinker Atrios Michelle Malkin

Crooks And Liars Townhall

Washington Monthly Volokh Conspiracy

Think Progress Ann Althouse

MattYGlesias Instapundit

Digby Powerline Blog

Balloon Juice Outside The Beltway

Ezra Klein Gateway Pundit

Five Thirty Eight Patterico's Pontifications

Truthdig Red State

Sadly, No! Memeorandum

Talk Left Wizbang Blog

Feministing Jawa ReportPandagon Anti-Idiotarian

Shakespeares Sister American Digest

Glen Greenwald Right Wing News

Juan Cole Black Five

The Moderate Voice IMAO

Crooked Timber Professor Bainbridge

Open Left LaShawn Barber


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Nexis and Google Trends led to 13 dates being selected as peaks of discussion on the topic. In

2009 these are June 6th; July 23rd;August 12th, 13th; September 9th; October 14th, 29th;

November 17th; December 21st; In 2010 these are January 20th; February 24th; March 23rd,

24th. These posts were accessed online from the blog's archives and the hyperlinks were then

extracted manually from there in a content analysis. Not every post that contained a reference

to healthcare was used. There were many instances where healthcare reform was alluded to

but not actually discussed. An example of this would be if when talking about the climate

change bill that was being debated at the time of some of the sample dates, a blogger

mentioned that the two bills were before congress at the same time but focused the post on

climate change. From the 50 blogs, and the 13 sample dates, a total of 2324 posts were

relevant, and they contained 4844 links. The benefit of this manual process over using crawler

software to fish for the links, is that this way only the links from posts will be counted,whereas with a crawler it would be difficult to differentiate between advertisements, links on

a blogroll or other irrelevant content. Blogrolls are a list of links that appear on a blog as a

semi-permanent list, as opposed to the once off linking in posts. They will be separated and

excluded from the main body of analysis as they are static links and do not show active

engagement with another blogger, also, as identified by Ackland (2005), those links may

become stale and possible forgotten about, and so are too great a variable to include in the

study of an active network. A more in depth understanding of the methodology and procedure

with sampling and content analysis was gained from Gillian Roses work Visual

Methodologies (2007).

To measure how insular the networks are, or how strong the internal linking is,

Hargattai et al. (2008, 76) again will be used. A formula that calculates the ratio (EI) between

internal network links among members of the ideological community, and external links that

direct to outside the community will produce a figure between -1 and 1. The closer to -1 the

figure is, the more insular the network. The formula is : EI = (E I)/(E+I)

where E = number of external links, I = number of internal links.

The insularity of the network is important, as that is really the measure of how strong a

network is. If a network is not at all insular or 'close knit' then it can be quite inefficient and

time consuming to bring an issue to prominence within the community, to organise a

campaign or to raise funds. As in the offline world, a close community or network has both

disadvantages and advantages. We have seen the advantages, but one of the disadvantages is

that the network may also be inefficient in accumulating outside information, in engaging

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with other groups to their benefit or to be part of a bigger campaign or movement that would

interest the network members.

After the introduction, chapter one will further define what a blog is, their rise and the

reasons for studying them Chapter two is concerned with networks and communities,

examining the reasons why there may or may not be much linking between the two online

communities and potential implications of this. Chapter three will follow to hold the results of

the content analysis and findings from the study. Chapter four will discuss the findings in

relation to the anticipated results and previous research, and the thesis will finish with a

conclusion which will summarise the results of the analysis and suggest areas for future study.

Published academic research into this area is unfortunately lagging behind real timeevents. In his 2008 paper on the nature of blogs, David Karpf notes that Publication

timelines operate at a snail's pace compared to the speed of blogging. Research from 2004 and

2005 (when the size of the blogosphere was estimated at between 2 and 4 million) is being

published in 2008 (Karpf 2008a, 369). To put this into perspective, in Karpf (2008a) a figure

of 118million blogs is cited as being the amount tracked by the website Technorati.com at the

time of writing his article. This thesis will build upon the work carried out by others such as

David Karpf, Clay Shirky, Mark Treymane and more. The work closest to this thesis in terms

of aims and methodology is that of Hargittai et al. (2008), who mapped the network of cross

ideological links in, though with the fast paced evolution of the web, an update in this young

area of study will always be beneficial. This thesis will add to the study of new media,

networks and communities by using the three fields to answer the one research question of

What has been the response, if any, of the political blog network to changes in web

technology?

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Chapter One: Blogs

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1.1 Blogs: History and Uses

As of August 6 2010 there are approximately 144,444,525 blogs on the internet

according to Blogpulse.com, a blog monitoring and internet statistics website. The figures

produced by ranking websites such as Blogpulse and Technorati.com are for total blogs in

existence, it is important to point out that at the moment it is very difficult to produce an

accurate number for active blogs, that is, blogs that are updated and in use. A 2003 report by

Perseus Development found that of 66percent of blogs that had been started had not been

updated in two months (The Blogging Iceberg, 2003). There is little or no incentive for a

blogger to delete his or her account if they decide to discontinue their posts and so the blogs

will stay online and add to the figure of total of blogs while not actually producing anything.

It is also difficult to separate real blogs from splogs (spam blogs) which are blogs set up to

advertise products, and have content designed solely to catch the attention of search engines.

Among those that study the area, it is generally agreed that the September 11 th attacks on New

York marked the start of the rise of the blog in general, and especially the political and the

war blog, with vast numbers of citizens starting blogs and wishing to engage with others to

discuss the impending war and the current political situation (Tremayne et al. 2006; Adamic

and Glance 2005). They were a means for entering into public discourse, essentially

becoming another way to participate in the political sphere. (Tremayne et al. 2006, 290).

The 2004 presidential election in the U.S. was also an important moment for blogs.

Much study focuses on this period as this is believed to be when political blogging took off

and really separated itself from being politics, economy and war blogging to just political

blogs. Much of the research done in investigating the relationships between opposing

ideological stances as manifested in blogs centres on this area (Tremayne et al. 2006; Adamic

and Glance 2005) and also the relationship that the emerging blogging ecosystem has with the

established news media (Wallsten 2007; Scott 2008). David Karpf notes this too, saying Itappears that scholarly interest has particularly focused on the 2004 elections, with the bulk of

papers that study the elite bloggers choosing this time period for their data collection (Karpf

2008b, 34). Blogs had of course been around long before that, first booming in 1999 with the

launch of the Pyra Labs Blogger software platform, at Blogger.com, that made self publishing

articles easy enough for anyone to use. It was, however, the two events mentioned that are

agreed to have started the widespread engagement in political blogging in the U.S.

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The importance of studying blogs in general and the political blogs specifically is

summed up succinctly in Hargittai et al. (2008) when they say that political blogging

introduces tens of thousands of readers daily to frequently updated content on a vast array of

political topics, and through their ability to influence the mainstream media's content, they

can therefore influence political figures (2008, 70). Drezner and Farrell quote from research

published by Rainie, Fox and Fallows from 2003, that is no longer available to view online,

saying that only 4percent of online Americans reported going to blogs for information and

opinions. The authors of the research conclude that The overall number of blog users is so

small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses

blogs (Drezner and Farrell 2008, 15). Even several years on from the findings of Rainie et al.

Hargattai et al. also note the lack of information about who reads and writes the blogs, Not

much data exist on the demographics of bloggers or blog readers (2008, 70). There are a fewfigures available to us that illustrate the demographic of the political bloggers though the

survey they are from was a small sample group. The findings show that political blogs are

written by mainly white (80percent), well educated (40percent of respondents had earned an

advanced degree) males (80percent). These figures are used by Kevin Wallsten (2007) to

illustrate the potential harm done by having such power of control lie in the hands of a group

that

are dramatically unrepresentative of the American population [. . .] To the extent that

these demographic differences are associated with differences in issue priorities, thetendency of journalists to take cues about which issues deserve further attention from

political blogs may significantly limit the scope of issues that receive attention from

the mainstream media (Wallsten 2007, 581).

There are however figures from at least one section of the blog consumers. In 2004 Marci

McCoy Roth published results from a survey saying that of the 84percent of journalists who

said they visited a political blog in the past 12 months, approximately 30percent of those

respondents said they checked a political blog at least once a day on a regular basis (Roth2004, 13). Drezner and Farrell quote from a 2005 study that A 2008 survey updates this

information saying that over 75percent of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story

ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue (Thaeler, 2008).

A 2006 Pew Internet and American Life Project survey about blogging tells us that

most bloggers (54percent) use their blogs to express themselves creatively and share Life

Experiences. Only 11percent say Politics and Government are the focus of their blog,

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though interestingly 72percent of bloggers look online for news or information about politics

(Bloggers 2006). This thesis will focus on the political side of blogging. Even though it makes

up a small proportion of published blog posts, there has been research into the influence the

political blogosphere has and the consensus is that there are noticeable and sometimes

sizeable effects in the offline world (Wallsten 2007; Smolkin 2004). A visible and well known

example of the influence political blogging can have in the offline world is the furore and

eventual resignation of U.S. Senator Trent Lott that came about when bloggers picked up on

comments the senator made that seemed to support policies of racial segregation. The

comments were passed over in the mainstream media, but were taken very seriously by

bloggers. Thanks to the constant attention given to the issue online, the mainstream offline

media picked back up on it and the resulting pressure led to the senator resigning his seat.

1.2 What Constitutes a Blog

Several important elements constitute a blog though there are many variations of blogs

to be found. Blogs usually allow reader's comments on an article, and most will contain a

blogroll, a list of links to other blogs that the blog host wants to connect his audience to,

though there are many blogs that have only one or neither of these. Rather than there being an

archetypal blog format, there are several combinations of features that make up what is

termed a blog. Some blogs are based on one person posting; others have a few authors that

work together; some allow for a community to engage in debate about the posts and the issues

raised; others still are presented just as a read only article. David Karp (2008b) introduces us

to a typology of four separate and distinct blog types which I will briefly summarise here:

Classic Blogs These are the starter type of blog and the most popular overall.

Usually run by a single person or small group. These types of blogs are valued as hubs

and community nodes in close knit networks of like minded bloggers, with the

blogroll section playing a large part in the social network. The elite individual political

bloggers have been found to be elite in other ways too. By and large, the elite

individual bloggers in the left and right political blogospheres hold a masters degree

at minimum, with many of them holding advanced degrees as well (2008a, 372).

Community Blogs While the classic format of blog maximises the voice of an

individual or small and select group, a community blog architecture provides for

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multiple authors and promotes discussion and collaboration. These community sites

have a large and interactive audience, and it is not uncommon for authors of smaller,

more classic style blogs to repost their articles on these community blogs to gain a

bigger audience than they would get on their own sites.

Institutional Blogs These blogs import the standard infrastructure to enhance the

value of traditional elite institutions. Political campaigns, congressional offices, and

mainstream media organizations have all added blogging to their suite of online

offerings (2008a, 373). The aim of these blogs is to further the the goal and spread

the message of an institution. Political Camaigns, corporate blogs, fundraising pages

can all be examples of this type. Sometimes run basically as a means of introducing

press releases online to bigger audiences than the traditional method of only sendingthem to media outlets would have earned.

Bridge Blogs These are a type of blog that combines the institutional and community

blog types. They typically adopt the organisational structure of institutions but have

the community enabling software platforms of other, more true to form, blogs.

Huffingtonpost.com and Townhall.com are prime examples of this type.

These four types as identified by Karpf cover all that is seen to be a blog. The final

type, the bridge blog, is the newest one and the one evolving at the highest rate as blogs shift

from their original incarnation to becoming big media businesses.

1.3 Blogs, the 'Old' Media, and Influence

The lines that had existed between the traditional media, the fourth estate, and the

bloggers, who see themselves almost as a fifth estate (Wallsten 2007, 258) charged with

keeping the mainstream media in check, have now become irreversibly blurred. There are

now elite blogs and bloggers as well as elite news media, and sometimes the producers of

both are one and the same. For this thesis, common blogger terms will be adopted to separate

the two media spheres into old media, being television, newspapers and radio, and new

media, being the online only media. The old/established media is also called the mainstream

media, though in the world of political blogging this is a somewhat loaded term, being used

more as a reference among progressive commentators, but commonly as a pejorative in the

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conservative communities, who as a group, don't trust the mainstream or liberal media with

a few exceptions, notably the Fox News Network.

With the growing popularity of the internet, nearly all newspapers, radio and television

stations have started an online presence. For a while the old media's web presence and

bloggers ran parallel to each other occasionally linking. As blogging surged in popularity,

there was a sharp increase in professionalisation in the blogging world. Established media

outlets began to host blogs written by their staff as well as their published articles, and then

took bloggers on to their staff. In writing about this evolution David Karpf says previously

independent bloggers such as Matthew Yglesias, James Wolcott, Glenn Greenwald, and Kevin

Drum have all been hired by major news magazines as a result of their work. Their blogs are

now featured elements of existing media sites challenging the notion of bloggers asdistinctively counter- elite (2008a, 370). Glen Reynolds also currently writes a column in

The Washington Examiner. The Pew Internet survey from 2006 gives a figure of 34percent for

the amount of bloggers that consider what they do as a form of journalism (Bloggers 2006).

Organisations such as Hotair.com and gawker.com are a collective of bloggers, some

professional. The difficulty in ascribing a label to one of these websites is exemplified by the

Huffington Post. There are hundreds of paid contributors, editors, other non-editorial staff and

the topics covered rival any published newspaper. The site is basically a newspaper online,

however, it is still ranked as a blog by all the ranking websites.

Whether the traditional media is being affected by blogs is not in question, what is

questioned is to what extent do blogs influence the offline media agenda. Indeed Kevin

Wallsten's paper on this very topic found that on the vast majority of issues there was a

complex, bidirectional relationship between mainstream media coverage and blog discussion

rather than a unidirectional media or blog agenda-setting effect (Wallsten 2007, 567).

Rachael Smolkin, in her 2004 article The Expanding Blogosphere, quotes political journalist

Walter Shapiro as saying blogs definitely have an impact on political journalism, we just

haven't figured out what the impact is (Smolkin 2004, 40). In the same article, Glen

Reynolds of Instapundit.com, a conservative political blog, is quoted as saying Bloggers

have very little power [. . .] What they have is influence. They have an ability to get ideas

noticed that would otherwise be ignored (Smolkin 2004, 41). Wallsten concludes that

political bloggers are emerging as important actors in the agenda- setting process (2007,

581). Their importance comes not directly from writing ability or quality of information, it is

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more that a blog provides a hub for a community to gather around and discuss ideas, organise

campaigns and allow many voices to become one loud enough for the media and perhaps

policy makers to take heed of.

Bloggers rarely do any original reporting, usually it is commenting on news reports or

opinion pieces. Tremayne et al. found this to be true, with 59percent of their sample group

posts being opinion posts, surveillance type posts at 39percent, and reporting making up only

2percent of total, with less than 1percent being personal posts (2006). An interesting question

is raised by John Zogby writing for Forbes.com (Zogby 2008). He asks why do people trust

the internet more as a news source than the traditional media. He quotes from surveys carried

out by Zogby Interactive, that puts the internet in front with 37percent of respondents citing it

as the most reliable source of news, with television at 17percent, newspapers at 16percent andradio at 13percent. Given that the main source for news on the internet is the web content of

traditional media companies, e.g. The New York Times at Nytimes.com, or blogs that get their

news from the traditional media, as we've seen they rarely do original reporting themselves,

these statistics give weight to the argument that it is the ideological stance of the source that

matters rather than the content. This is borne out by the results from this research as well. The

top five sources for news for both of the two ideologies were the same. Each group relied

heavily on the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Politico.com, and

Thehill.com, for the majority of their sources. Though as expected conservatives were more

found to be more likely to link to smaller forms of media in general rather than the bigger

companies, and the progressive side were more likely to use more established media sources.

Conservatives have been shown previously (Tremayne et al. 2006, 302) to distrust the

liberal media, and consume their news from either very select sources that match their

ideology, i.e. Fox News, and from blogs, even though the blogs get their information from old

media. This study found that overall the two groups directed just under 32percent of their

outgoing links towards 'old media' sources. Though had they included a link every time they

referenced a mainstream media story, the figure would be a lot higher. Figures for this were

not taken, but it raises an interesting question about the nature of blogging. The typical article

on the website of an old media company does not have many embedded hyperlinks, are the

elite bloggers in the study emulating the style of mainstream content? A number of the

bloggers on the list of blogs studied were employed by traditional media companies. Ezra

Klein writes for the Washington Post, and as noted, the Huffington Post prides itself on it's

professional approach to blogging. Further study is certainly possible on the question of

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whether the elite are getting too elite?

Influence in the online world can be seen in a circular form. Media outlets, usually old

or 'mainstream' media, file reports and put the content online, bloggers read these and

comment on it on their blogs, the story is discussed on that and other blogs, and journalists

look to the blogosphere for story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue,

feeding the blog response to a story back into the media. It has been shown by Wallsten that in

the case of various news stories including abortion, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, social security and

voter fraud A-list blog discussion led to more media coverage of these issues (2007, 577).

Though these were in turn fed by continued media discussion of the topics.

The term 'A-List' blogs should be taken to mean the blogs that are most popular, notnecessarily those written by elite commentators such as famous journalists or celebrity

authors. As they are the most popular, the ones most at the centre of their respective networks,

they are the ones that will be used in this thesis to produce the graph of the network.The list

will be the top blogs as listed using the Blogosphere Authority Index (BAI), which was

formed, calculated, introduced and is frequently updated by David Karpf on his blog at

www.blogosphereauthorityindex.com. Blogs are ranked in a number of different ways by a

number of different sources. Karpf's BAI is an aggregation system for these separate data and

combines them all into one score. It measures a Network Centrality Score (NCS), which is

how recommended a blog is by the blogging community, as measured by the amount of links

to it from other blog's blogrolls. The Hyperlink Authority Score (HAS) is from the site

Technorati.com, a site that ranks blogs on how many incoming hyperlinks the blog has. The

Site Traffic Score (STS) is a measure of how many unique visitors a website receives each

day. The Community Activity Score (CAS) is a measure of how involved the blog's audience

is with the blog. It measures total comments on posts in the site. The BAI works by

combining these scores and then removing the lowest score to guard against any unfair

advantage that may be gained, for example a site without commenting enabled would have a

low CAS but maybe is very popular otherwise (Karpf 2010). This thesis will use the data from

the update on 25 July 2010.

It can be established that outside the top 100 political blogs, or even the top 25, the

audience is so small that they do not really matter in terms of analysing the political blog

network. Though that is not to say that they are not influential in terms of shaping the blog

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agenda. Kevin Wallsten explains the influence of lesser blogs, i.e. not A-List blogs, thusly:

Elite bloggers will often link to lesser known blogs if they find an article worth reading and so

in that way others can read and be influenced by the lesser blog. Second, as a result of the

fact that they rely on the aggregate number of bloggers discussing an issue, less popular blogs

can have an impact on the so-called buzz indicators created by websites such as Blogdex

(http://www.blogdex.com), Day Pop (http://www.daypop.com), and Blog Pulse

(http://www.blogpulse.com). If journalists turn to these indicators for ideas about what to

cover, less popular blogs may be able to have an important impact on the media agenda.

(Wallsten 2007, 570).This characteristic of blog networks will be covered in more detail in

section 2.2.

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Chapter Two:Networks

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2.1 The Ideological Divide and Technology

It has been shown previously that there is a big divide between those of a progressive,

or liberal, stance and those identified conservatives (Adamic and Glance, 2005; Tremayne et

al. 2006; Hargittai et al. 2008; Ackland 2005). In these studies, the network has been shown to

be divided with only a few links between them; Objectivity is generally verboten in the

blogosphere, although ideology tends to be less rigid than the partisan debates that play out so

repetitiously in newspapers and on television (Smolkin 2004, 39). The internet has evolved

since those studies though. The web those authors examined was that of the Web 2.0. We are

now seeing the beginning of Web 3.0.

Web 1.0, consisted mainly of read only software platforms. This was an internet where

there were few content creators and many consumers, though compared to today's internet

penetration the numbers were still relatively modest. Web 2.0 was the internet of 2003 to

present. This saw the rise of user generated content and developments that made the most

popular websites around now possible such as Youtube.com and Facebook.com. Web 3.0 is a

term that encompasses many things including cloud computing, mobile wireless connectivity

and user created software platforms such as interactive applications. Web 3.0 is all about

tailoring the online experience to the individual user, and we are seeing this aspect explode in

popularity with the various small and simple applications available for smart phones, socialnetworking sites, Amazon.com and Ebay.com's recommended items functions and targeted

advertising based on location and previous web activity.

The advent of even more accessible, and higher speed, internet access has changed the

way consumers interact with the online world. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation

and Development (OECD) gathers compiles data on internet and broadband usage and

regularly publishes and updates them online. According to them, in 2003, in the U.S.61.3percent of all households had access to a computer, with 19.9percent of all households

having broadband access (OECD 2010). The latest figures, from December 2009, show

63.5percent of all households are connected to broadband. That works out at 26.4 subscribers

per 100 people, increasing from just 10.91 in early 2004 (OECD 2010). For both business and

home, there was approximately 33 122 223 broadband connections in June 2004, moving to

81 146 225 connections by the end of 2009 (OECD 2010). All these statistics show is that

there was a massive demand for the internet. The advent of high speed, affordable, high

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penetration access, plus mobile access from new generation phones, led to the development of

apps that made engaging with blogs faster, easier and more user friendly than before. Of the

50 blogs used for this study, 13 of them had parts of their sites devoted to mobile content in

the form of apps or special layouts (5 were progressive blogs, 8 conservative).

There now exists personalised content aggregators in the form of RSS feeds where this

would have been done previously by dedicated aggregator sites such as Bloglines.com, or

even Memeorandum.com, one of the sites used in the analysis of the network. With integrated

blog software that can be installed right into an internet browser window, sourcing blog

articles, commenting on them and posting your own can now be done with one click of a

mouse. The vast majority of political blogs are on twitter as well. This enables rapid sharing

among readers and distribution of a post in ways that were unforeseeable even five years ago.Compare this to the Web 2.0 experience of having to go to a blog individually, wait for the

dial-up modem to load each page and then interact in a fairly limited way with the content,

and it is clear how much has changed for blogs.

There has been discussion on whether the advancement of web technologies that

enhance the ability of the internet as a place where speech is basically unrestricted could lead

to polarisation and more extreme divides between ideologies, or foster more productive

debate on important issues. One side to the debate is that there are so many different content

sources of varying ideological bents that it allows a consumer to shop around for their news

and views and only expose themselves to opinions and news that is sympathetic to their own

views. Yale law professor Jack Balkin sees this problem and offers a theoretical solution,

saying the answer lies in the cross-ideological links between conservatives and progressives,

as linking also produces a good check on criticism because you can actually go and read

what the person being criticized has said (Balkin 2004, sec. 4, par. 6).

Technology could easily play a part in dividing the two sides. In his 2001 book, Cass

Sunstein notes this downside of technology saying the most striking power provided by

emerging technologies [is] the growing power of consumers to filter what they see (Sunstein

2001, 8)1. He goes on to point out the potentially negative effect on democracy of a

population that increasingly evades debate with opposition and only exposes itself to

viewpoints sympathetic to their own.

1 Emphasis in the original.

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There is also the view that the internet is a place where there is a virtually limitless

number of places on online debating forums, whether they are in a formalised chat structure

or in the comments sections of posted articles, for normal people to engage with each other,

rather than relying on media elites that traditionally would have debated in public about

political issues. There are a few moderate blogs where the two sides come together, but none

really compete with the ideologically charged sites (Tremayne et al. 2006, 298).

A contrasting approach to these concerns about fragmentation would suggest that the

vast amounts of information available thanks to the Web are enabling people to

sidestep mainstream media and seek out numerous sources of information previously

less accessible to them. Instead of having to rely on a handfulor even a few hundred

television channels, radio stations and print media, people have millions of sources

at their fingertips from which to choose likely representing more diverse viewpoints

than mainstream sources ever made possible. This may lead people to consume morevaried types of content than before. This alternative perspective suggests that thanks to

the easy availability of diverse viewpoints online, bloggers will engage with others

including ones representing differing ideologies (Hargittai, E., Gallo, J., & Kane, M.

2008, 70).

Hargittai at al. also draw attention to the fact that the blogs basically make up a social

network, and use the idea of 'homophily', the tendency of people to associate with others like

them, to conclude that political bloggers are more likely to link to those who share their

ideological perspective than engage in conversations with those who disagree with them(Hargittai et al. 2008, 69)

Jack Balkin's solution to the problem of divisiveness, however, fails to account for

how the link is presented and framed. Because these links are placed in ideologically charged

arenas, the content contained therein is going to be influenced by that frame. Jim A. Kuypers

explains, in his work Press Bias and Politics (2002), that because of the frames placed on the

information, the way an audience analyses and thinks about information is altered. (2002 ,203). The chapter analyses how the press influences the public in elections, but the theory can

be translated safely to the blog medium. In the book, Kuypers explains that frames provide

interpretive cues used by readers to make sense of neutral facts (Kuypers, 2002: 198).

Gunther Kress, describes how, through the use of linguistic analysis, how a writer or

institution, such as a media outlet, lets their ideological stance shape their output whether it is

intentional or not, though it often is. It represents an attempt to structure the readers

interpretation of the event and to bring him or her into agreement with the papers ideology

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(Kress 1983, 135). Hargattai et al. found that a significant portion of the cross network links,

approximately 50percent, were in reference to a disagreement that was not based on factual

argument, but were just pointing to the linked article to show the fallacy of an opponent's

position (2008, 78). In the research carried out for this thesis, it was found that

approximately 42.8percent of the cross ideological links were of the same sort. This was after

adjusting the figures to cancel the affect Memeorandum.com had on them

The analysis of the blogs in this thesis will include a qualitative aspect to try and

answer these questions about divisiveness. Using the classifications formulated by Hargattai

et al. in their study the cross-ideological links will be categorised thusly: 1) straw-man

argument, (2) disagreement on substance, (3) neutral non-political, (4) redirect, and (5)

agreement on substance (Hargattai et al. 2008, 78). These are explained in the paper as: Straw-man are posts in which one blogger links to another in order to point out the

fallacy of an opponents position without actually addressing the substance of that

position in more than a cursory manner.

Disagreement on substance, represents posts where one blog author links to a specific

post of another author and uses that post to challenge the claims made in the linked-to

post [. . .] Blog posts that fall into this category directly address the content of the

linked-to post and offer either a critique or refutation of the argument made therein.

Neutral or Non-political. Links in the posts that are not related to political issues, or

the topic at hand.

A redirection link can be viewed as a footnote of sorts, as a blogger cites the source

of a story or references the work of another blogger without tackling the specifics of

the original authors commentary.

Agreement on substance. Opinions expressed in such posts are explicitly in

agreement with the writing of the linked-to entry.

(Hargattai et al. 2008, 81-83)

2.2 Networks and Communities

Networks are an inescapable and important part of the way everything functions, from

cellular biology, transport systems, academic research and, of course, the internet. Every

interaction with another element creates another link or node in a network. Networks operate

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by a series of nodes and the links between those nodes. In studying the blogosphere, the nodes

are the blogs, the edges, or vertices, are the links and the 'degree' is the amount of links to a

particular blog. In the results of the research for this thesis we can see clearly that there are a

small number of sites, like the Huffington Post or Talking Points Memo, that are highly linked

to the network, they become hubs of the network in effect, with high traffic volumes and a

disproportionately large amount of inbound links. Choices about what site to get your news

from online are rarely made in a vacuum of influence. The result of influence in this case is

that the websites with the most links, the highest ranking scores, are the ones with the highest

fitness (Barabsi 2003, 95) and so an audience new to the network will choose, most of the

time, to go to the site that has been proven rather than an unknown. Popular sites continue to

get more popular and lesser sites will find it harder to gain a readership.

Network analysis has shown that there are mathematical graphs that can explain the

degree distribution of popularity in online networks (Adamic and Huberman 2000; Shirky

2003; Pennock et al. 2005; Drezner and Farrell 2008). Though there are valid arguments about

the different shapes presented, they broadly mean the same thing. The differences are mainly

to do with variations in possibility and discussion of the mathematical and statistical

implications are more suited to a work on network theory or mathematics, not humanities.

The main conclusions to be drawn from them though, are that the degree distribution of the

political blog network, and indeed almost all micro-communities inside the online macro-

community, is highly skewed, presenting few blogs at the top, with the vast majority operating

at below average popularity. The political blogosphere still operates on a 'rich get richer' basis

as per the findings of Barabsi (2003, 95) and Adamic & Glance (2005, 38), but it is less

difficult for lesser blogs to gain an audience than in other sub-communities as the degree

distribution is not as found elsewhere. From this, those who study this field can form

predictions about the future performance of the network.

The skew in the distribution of popularity is important for explaining influence and

why only the top 25 blogs on each side will be looked at in this thesis. To gain readership,

blogs have to be linked to, otherwise an audience will remain unaware of its existence no

matter the quality of writing or information contained on it is. If a lesser blogger has

information, or a new opinion about a political issue, and posts it on their blog, they will often

alert the bigger blogs to its publication. If the bigger blogs think the lesser blogs posts are

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worthy of directing their audience towards them, they re-post the link for their large audience

to follow and the endorsement from the bigger site increases the lesser blog's credibility

among the blog audience. In this way, the big blogs can act as content aggregators for the

lesser blogs and also focus the blogosphere's attention on a topic through its decisions on

whether to link to the lesser blogs opinions or information, or not. As we've seen before,

journalists have long been consumers of blogs. For journalists, in terms of time costs, it would

be too much to sift through a lot of lesser blogs and so looking at the bigger ones and seeing

their focus and emphasis on certain topics creates, as mentioned in the introduction, a

summary statistic about the distribution of opinions on a given political issue (Drezner

and Farrell 2008, 22). Given the previous evidence noted in chapter one (1.1) of the use

journalists make of blogs, and the large amounts of research that have shown that the media

agenda influences the political agenda, we can say that this is how even lesser blogs can makean impact, but also why only the top section of the blog network need by studied for this

particular research.

2.3 Community Boundaries.

We know there is a considerable divide between those of differing ideological stances

both online and offline. Understanding the nature of communities and the boundaries they

place on themselves will in turn give greater understanding of why the political blog network

is so divided. This thesis is not intended to be an ethnographical analysis of individual or

community behaviour, rather the interest in the area is to increase understanding of the present

subject. One thing that contributes greatly to the divide is the demographic of the bloggers

themselves. As shown in chapter one, the demographic of political bloggers is out of sync

with that of the U.S. in general. Because of their demographic, political bloggers may not

have interest in certain subjects, and since the political blogs are so influential, the growing

influence of political blogs may have the effect of further silencing groups who are already

excluded from the political debate (Wallsten 2007, 581).

Actions such as densely interlinking, protecting boundaries, and/or trying to attack

outsiders are all signs of protective community behaviour and when used by a community that

act as gatekeepers of information to a much wider macro-community, it can be quite a serious

thing. Here it can be done by discrediting ideological opponents (with straw-man arguments

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for example as explained in section 2.1), or even attacking the opposing network itself are all

behaviours consistent with strong community behaviour. The strong community element

found in previous research on the conservative blogosphere network could possible be an

example

of a counter-hegemonic movement in which socially or politically marginalizedgroups find expressive space on the Internet in which to locate like-minded others,

speak freely, and forge solidarity [. . .] Such groups must often exert themselves in

boundary maintenance work (social marking, policing, sanctioning), due to both the

permeability of their spaces and the fact that external agents often control some of the

key technical, economic, and legal resources on which their spaces depend (Lindlof et

al. 1998, 174).

A result from a poll conducted by the New York Times gives credence to this argument,

saying that 45percent of Tea Party members believe the goal of the large, conservative,

movement should be to "Reduce Federal Government (Polling the Tea Party, 2010). Another,

recent, example of the conservative community in general engaging in community activity at

the expense of their ideological rivals is the discovery of a group of conservatives 'bu rying'

stories unfavourable to a conservative point of view on news aggregation website Digg.com

(Oleoleolson, 2010). The Tea Party movement in the U.S. is a fine example of a tight knit

community, united by a common goal. When attacked, as a movement they respond. They are

always 'on message' when being interviewed and proudly display their community

involvement. This is good for the movement, but from this tight community there come some

dangerous ideas that, because they are presented as part of the community ethos , are

cyclically reinforced until they become urban legend in a fraction of the time it would have

taken were they not so well connected and organised online. The massive support and almost

blind following questionable political figures such as Sarah Palin and pundit Glenn Beck

enjoy means that any information the elites, or even ordinary members, of the community

wish to spread, whether it be for positive or negative purposes, is spread far and wide and has

unrivalled potential to influence the public in ways that it would not normally be responsive

to were the message not, thanks to the online support and vocality of the community, so all

pervasive.

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Chapter Three: Results

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3.1 Network Graphs

Figure 1. shows the results of the research in full. The blue nodes on the left represent the

progressive blogs and on the right, in red, is the conservative side. The layout shows a clear

difference in linking behaviour between the two sides. The nodes and vertices are for display

only, they are not weighted to show the respective popularity of each individual site, nor does

it show the frequency of the links. The graph illustrates that the two sides are relatively

separated, with a clear bias shown towards linking to others of the same ideology. The inner

nodes of the shape are thenodes that connected in cross ideological links to the other side,

while the ones on the outside were found only to have links inside their network. It is clear

that there is a large difference in linking behaviour as well, with the progressive side visibly

engaging more in their network than the conservatives. The five conservative blogs separatedfrom the group, are blogs that were not linked to and in turn did not link to anyone else in the

blog entries studied.

Figure 1. The U.S.political blogosphere network during discussion of the reform of the

American health system, June 2009 to March 2010.

Figure 2. shows the graph again but with the two most linked too sites removed. The site

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Talking Points Memo was linked to more then any other progressive site, both from inside the

network and from across the ideological divide. The site Memeorandum.com had huge

amount of outgoing links that blocked the view of the rest of the network.

Memeorandum.com has no content of its own, rather it is an aggregator blog for news. It

collects articles from blogs and the mainstream media and packages them according to genre

and topic for the audience to consume, With those two very well connected sites gone, it

becomes more visible how much interlinking is going on both internally and externally in the

respective networks.

Figure 2 . Map of the network adjusted for demonstration purposes.

Figure 3. shows the a qualitative assessment of the type of cross-ideological linkage that

occurred between the two sides. The graph does not show the results of all the cross

ideological links though. As explained, Memeorandum.com has no content of it's own, it has

just headlines and links to other sites. Therefore there is no frame put around the links it

presents and so are classified in coding as being 'Redirect' links. There were 154 cross

ideological links from the site, all coded the same, and so forscaling and comparative

purposes they shall be left out of the graph.

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Figure 3, showing an adjusted graph of the types of frames put on cross-ideological links.

3.2 Tables of Results.

Table 2. holds the raw data from the graph at Figure 1. The two figures for the conservatives

redirect value is the actual figure, and then without Memeorandum.com added to it.

Table 2. Types of cross-ideological links in sample.

28

Progressive Conservative

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

Qualitative Assessment of Cross-Ideological Linkage

Straw-man Disagreement onsubstance

Neutral/Non-Political

Redirect Agreement on Substance

Straw-man

Redirect

P rogressive 16 5 3 1 3

Conservative 7 4 2 1 6 6 /1 2 6

Disagree

-

mentonsub

-

stance

Neutral/Non-

Political

Agreement

onSubstance


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Table 3. showing the results of the study of the blogs that were then turned into the visual

representations of the networks. The MSM stands for 'Main Stream Media'.

Table 3 holds a summary of the findings from quantitatively looking at the blogs and their

links. As with the other figures, these have been adjusted to offset the influence of the large

numbers of links gathered from Memeorandum.com. These figures, put another way, tell us

that over all, there were 2.8 links per post overall, with progressive bloggers linking an

average of 1.68 times in their posts, and conservatives 3.3 times (2.4 without

Memeorandum.com). Also, 13.5percent of links were to an internal network with progressives

having 17.77percent of their links internal to the network, compared to just 6.86percent of

total links for the conservatives, 4.33percent without Memorandum.com. Using the formula

set out earlier in the introduction, we find that the ratio that measures how insular the network

is tell us that the conservative network gets a figure of o.85 (0.86 when Memeorandum.com is

removed). The progressive side of the network produced a figure of 0.64. showing that

contrary to expectations formed from the secondary sourse material, the progressive side werethe most insular.

Tables 4, 5, 6, and table 7 are the results of the research set out to see exactly who was linking

to who in the elite section of the political blogosphere. From the tables it is clear to see the

progressive side are far more active in blogging and linking than their conservative

counterparts. Different reasons for this shall be discussed in the following chap

29

Total Conservative Progressive Total

Posts 574 1750 2324

477 1750Links 1895 2949 4844

1156 4105

Internal Network Links 130 524 654

82 606Cross-Ideological Links 185 25 210

31 63

Links to MSM 551 788 1339

438 1226

(w/o Memeorandum.com)






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Table 4. showing the internal network links of the Conservative blogs.

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Table 5. showing the external network links of the Conservative blogs.

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Table 6. showing the internal network links of the Progressive blogs.

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Table 7. showing the external network links of the Progressive blogs.

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Chapter Four: Discussion

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4.1 Expected Results Compared to Actual Results.

The expected results, as mentioned throughout the thesis, were that the conservative

side would prove to be the more insular community however the results did not show that.

Instead we saw a marked increase in the propensity to link from the progressive side and a

sharp decline in the strength of the conservative network. This may have been just a by

product of the sampling procedure, where the research missed several days that could have

been full of links and changed the graph completely. However, due to the consistency

observed in the lack of linking behaviour from the conservative side and and comparative

consistency observed in the progressive sides linkage, that seems unlikely.

This thesis set out to investigate the structure of the blog's networks network as thedensity and and the linking pattern of blogs has implications for the online visibility or

prominence of different political ideologies (Ackland, 2005, 2). This is important when a

community wants to get a message across, raise funds, or influence political decision makers

or voters. Drezner and Farrell note that it is not difficult to use the skewed nature of the

networks to influence topics discussed (2008, 21). Conservative blog networks have been

found previously to be the most densely and efficiently linked together (Adamic and Glance

2005; Tremayne et al. 2006; Ackland 2005, Herring et al. 2005, 7, Adamic 1999). This was

not the case with the research carried out for this thesis. It was found that the progressive side

were both more prolific with their commentary on healthcare, and also they formed more of a

community. One of the bloggers from the conservative side of the analysed blogs wrote about

the divide himself, saying that for years, liberals have tended to be more communal online

whereas conservatives have tended to be individualistic (Joyner 2009, par.6). This anecdotal

evidence, from a blogger that's been heavily involved long term in the very networks being

studied, contradicts the findings from the past studies mentioned but ties in with those in this

thesis. One possible reason for this is that the classifications used by academics to divide the

network do not correspond accurately enough with the actual tone of the blogs studied. The

healthcare debate was divisive, but it did not divide the progressive and conservative

blogospheres down the middle. In the sample posts studied, there was a lot of negative

commentary from the progressive side about the bill that would have been well placed in a

conservative setting, and correspondingly, some very moderate views from the conservative

sites.

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Conclusion

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