Proving that blogs affect society
Tim Finin, 1:00pm 27 April 2006The mesh conference will have a panel on how the blogosphere affects society. Mathew Ingram writes in can blogs affect politics and society? :
“As a lead-up to mesh in May, the Gang of Five — that is me, Rob Hyndman, Mark Evans, Mike McDerment and Stuart “call me Chairman Mao†MacDonald — have been talking a lot (not surprisingly) about the themes we want to look at, and crawling the blogosphere for evidence of how Web 2.0 and blogs are — or aren’t — affecting media, marketing, business and society/politics.â€
Rob Hyndman also writes about the panel.
While it’s probably not controversial to believe that blogs influence politics and society, it may be hard to prove it objectively. An easier task is to show how blogs can influence other blogs and Web based communities. Akshay Java has been modeling influence in blog communities and has a technical report on it: Modeling the Spread of Influence on the Blogosphere. We think the work can be extended to document the spread of information and ideas from blogs to MSM. That’s a bit closer to showing that blogs affect society.
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Ebiquity Blog
November 6th, 2009 at 4:04 am
Blogs are a medium that perpetually generates hearsay and fact gathering or collaboration. We have heard and shared thoughts from all over the world regarding people, ideas, concepts, gossip, politics, religion, science, journals, and insights. The effect of a Blog helps accelerate influence and curves enthusiasm depending upon the content, source, readers, and bloggers (writers). Blogs allow people a common interface to communicate immediately and offer a brief instance of tapping into one’s beliefs and interests. Which is why political blogs have been quite useful and effective due to its low entry fee, instant communication features and ease of use or abuse.
Bloggers and their audience have the vast capability of exponentially growing by extending other Blogs and web based communities through inspiration, “word of mouth,” and cross-links to other posts or articles. One instance where Blogs have affected society beyond the computer is with the
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hqblog where the Obama campaign invested in the online communities inspiring “change” for his Presidential election. Also, read Nate Silver’s blog, fivethirtyeight.com.