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.