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!