writing commenced

i started writing. not a lot, but it's a start. i thought the best way to get going would be to use the term paper and modify / expand it. the main thing is getting started...

bibliography pt. 2

i think i have catalogued all the material i have now - 59 items all in all. now it's time for a quick sports break, and then for some writing! stay tuned.

bibliography

today i went ahead and started building my bibliography - that is, enter all the material i have into the bibtex "database" file (35 entries so far). i thought it would be a good way to refamiliarize myself with the material. the next step is to start writing the first part - i hope to get that started tomorrow.

signed up!

yesterday i handed in the official sign-up documents for my thesis. i should get mail from university by early next week with a due date (4 months from now).

i'll start writing the introductory part about blogs in general in the next few days to get back into a writing groove. i also need to look at two books i purchased (rebecca blood: the weblog handbook and joe trippi: the revolution will not be televised). i feel like i'm pretty well set up to write my thesis. we'll see how it goes. stay tuned...

topic and method

i spent the last week figuring out what to focus my paper on. the results:

• focus on the role of blogs during:
• US presidential election of 2004
  
• DE federal election of 2005 (or 2006?, t.b.d.)
• look into hypothesis of blogs being a gateway for MSM to the internet (cf. pew's "Innovative Study Suggests Where Blogs Fit into National Politics")

ideas regarding the method:

• analyze existing material regarding the topic, namely reports by pew and others, newspaper and magazine articles, blog posts, etc.
• compare certain aspects of blogs from the two aforementioned fields by performing some statistical analysis (e.g. total number of election blogs, number of posts per blog, length of posts, number of comments)

i'll start the whole thing out with an introduction on blogs, using my term paper as a basis. following that i will look at blogs in the US election and the DE election respectively, and then compare the findings. i will attempt to round things off with a look at where the developments are headed.

german election blogs round-up

the Bürger Herold ("Stimme der anderen Öffentlichkeit") has a list of blogs dealing with the elections which they promise to keep updated.
most notably:

• Wahlblog (german)
  
• wahlblog05.de (german)
  
• NRWSPD Blog (german)

well well... looks like the german blogosphere is coming to life in time for our elections here.

admin updates

just a quick update to say that (basically) all of the administrative hurdles are out of the way now. one of the lecturers has agreed to be the second reader for my paper (finally) and i already have my supervising lecturer's signature. i'll figure out in the coming week what my exact topic should be - right now i'm leaning towards looking at the influence of blogs in the US prez elections of 2004 and skipping the whole comparison through time part, as that would appear to be a bit too much for a thesis. but i'll decide next week.

extremely interesting reports from the Pew Internet & American Life Project

i just found a great source of material for my thesis. amongst other reports (scroll down for those), Pew Internet & American Life Project and BuzzMetrics released a preliminary report on may 16, 2005 entitled "Buzz, Blogs and Beyond: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004". some highlights:

BuzzMetrics and Dr. Michael Cornfield, a senior research consultant to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, studied the impact of political blogs on the national agenda during the last two months of the 2004 presidential campaign. (By political blogs, we mean only those few dozen blogs which are devoted to filtering public affairs news and which garner traffic in the tens of thousands.)

so far so good. it gets better:

In our research, we charted the popularity of certain topics which attracted buzz (a lot of simultaneous talk) during the fall campaign across four channels of communication: blogs, citizen chat rooms, the mainstream media, and the national campaigns.

perfect hit for my thesis i'd say.

Research Framework and Techniques
...
We tracked the frequency of posts by keywords on a variety of buzz topics in the time period 9/1/2004-11/3/2004. We coded message topics for comparative analysis in the time period 9/27/2004-10/31/2004.

...what more can i say. :-) definitely something i can use!

and that's not all. here's a list of interesting reports i found on their site:

• Content Creation Online
• 2004-02-29
• "11% of Internet users have read the blogs or diaries of other Internet users"
• The Future of the Internet
• 2005-01-09
• "One expert wrote, “The most obvious effects on news media are the rise of weblogs supplanting the public's attentions to traditional news media, and the slow death of newspapers due to erosion of mindshare by online influences such as news Web sites, chat rooms, message boards and online gaming.”"
• A decade of adoption: How the internet has woven itself into American life
• 2005-01-25
• "The widely varying information sources that are available online, combined with the new opportunities that the internet creates for civic participation, have begun to reshape politics and community life.
  Nowhere was that more evident than in the rapid rise of blogs during the 2004 campaign. Political bloggers serve up a boiling caldron of facts, rumors, commentaries, conspiracy theories, ideological screeds and media criticisms."
• The State of Blogging
• 2005-02-01
• "Just under one-in-ten internet users (9%) said they regularly or sometimes read political blogs during the campaign"
• The Internet and Campaign 2004
• 2005-03-06
• "A post-election, nationwide survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press shows that the online political news consumer population grew dramatically from 18% of the U.S. population in 2000 to 29% in 2004."
  
• BUZZ, BLOGS, AND BEYOND: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004
• 2005-05-23
• ...see above.

nice!

sign-up process not as easy as expected

forgot to give the promised update regarding my sign-up yesterday. i did try to sign up, and i managed to get the process started. the problem is that i have to find a co-examiner who will agree to co-read, co-correct and co-grade my work. i thought that was a given, but i'll have to pitch my thesis to the co-examiner as well. right now i'm trying to make an appointment to do that. all other formalities are finally taken care of though (as far as i know...).

my term paper "weblogs - a definition and classification" ported to LaTeX

to see if my newly acquired LaTeX skills are sufficient for writing my thesis, i ported my final term paper to LaTeX. here's the pdf version and a zip of the pdf. looks pretty good in my opinion, so i can quit fiddling with LaTeX and concentrate on contents now.

update 2005-06-28: new versions online with a few formatting changes.

update 2005-07-01: updated again

update 2005-07-05: and again

update 2008-11-11: moved files to a different location and updated links