The 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.”

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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