Skip to main content
Home
Snurblog — Axel Bruns

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Information
  • Blog
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Presentations
  • Press
  • Creative
  • Search Site

Blogs and Blogging

Snurb — Tuesday 12 October 2010 22:08

Tracing Publics in the Australian Blogosphere: New Methods for International Communication Research (DGMS 2010)

Blogs and Blogging | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | ECREA 2010 |

DGMS 2010 (ECREA 2010 Pre-Conference)

Tracing Publics in the Australian Blogosphere: New Methods for International Communication Research

Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Lars Kirchhoff, and Thomas Nicolai

  • 12 Oct. 2010 – Doing Global Media Studies (ECREA 2010 Pre-Conference)
Tracing Publics in the Australian Blogosphere: New Methods for International Communication Research

View more presentations from Jean Burgess.

In recent years, a number of studies have developed more or less comprehensive maps of a range of national blogospheres: Adamic & Glance (2005) mapped the US political blogosphere against the backdrop of the 2004 presidential election campaigns, Kelly & Etling (2009) mapped the Iranian blogosphere, Linkfluence (2009) mapped the intersections between political bloggers in a number of major European countries in the lead-up to the EU parliament elections. A common feature of these studies was that they presented momentary snapshots of these blogospheres, and often focussed largely on explicitly political blogs. Moving beyond such limitations, it would be interesting to see, for example, how the Iranian blogosphere might have changed in the wake of the bloody conflicts following the country's disputed presidential elections, or how significant a role the discussion of EU politics might have assumed within the space of the overall blogospheres in various European nations.

» continue reading...
Snurb — Tuesday 12 October 2010 20:24

Mapping Online Publics: Methodological Observations

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | Social Media Network Mapping | New Media and Public Communication (ARC Discovery) | ECREA 2010 |

Bremen.
The next speaker at ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ is my CCI colleague Jean Burgess, presenting on our Mapping Online Publics research project; this presentation is the methodological part, and I’ll show some more results at the main ECREA 2010 conference later in the week. Our research is part of an ARC Discovery project exploring methods for examining Australian social media use – the aim is to develop methods for computer-assisted cultural analysis. Over the course of the three years, we’ll examine blogs, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

Here’s Jean’s Powerpoint, and my transcript is below, too. I’ll …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 27 August 2010 09:31

The Trouble with the Fourth Estate

Politics | Journalism | Blogs and Blogging | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Industrial Journalism |

I spoke at an event organised by the Queensland Chapter of the Australasian Study of Parliament Group last night, in the Queensland Parliamentary Annexe – alongside Democrats leader turned Greens candidate Andrew Bartlett, On Line Opinion founder Graham Young, and Courier-Mail political journalist Craig Johnstone.

The theme of the evening was ‘whether bloggers are the new fourth estate’ – and here’s what  had to say (a bit of a rant, as is pretty much unavoidable after the election campaign we’ve had):

» continue reading...
Snurb — Tuesday 27 July 2010 16:36

Mapping Online Publics

Blogs and Blogging | Social Media Network Mapping | New Media and Public Communication (ARC Discovery) |

Just a quick plug for yet another project blog: as regular readers of this blog may know, with my colleague Jean Burgess and our collaborators Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai at Sociomantic Labs I was successful in winning an ARC Discovery grant in last year’s round, for a three-year project aiming to map public communication in Australia across a range of social media spaces.

With the project now getting underway in earnest (and we’ve already presented our methodology and early outcomes at a number of conferences), Jean and I have now set up Mapping Online Publics as a blog to cover our research methods and outcomes.

» continue reading...
Snurb — Saturday 10 July 2010 00:15

In Search of Australian Blogs: Determining the Extent of the Contemporary Australian Blogosphere (ANZCA 2010)

Blogs and Blogging | Social Media Network Mapping | New Media and Public Communication (ARC Discovery) | ANZCA 2010 |

ANZCA 2010

In Search of Australian Blogs: Determining the Extent of the Contemporary Australian Blogosphere

Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess

  • 8 July 2010 - ANZCA conference, Canberra
In Search of Australian Blogs: Determining the Extent of the Contemporary Australian Blogosphere

View more presentations from Axel Bruns.

Blogs, and the networked systems of blogging known as "blogospheres", are now part of the landscape of public communication in Australia. However, much of the research into Australian blogging has focussed only on selected genres and topics of blogging - political blogs (Bruns, 2008), personal diaries, knitting blogs (Humphreys, 2008), fiction blogs (Thomas, 2006) -, but is unable to provide a more comprehensive overview of the relative interest in and interconnections between these topics and communities. As part of a three-year ARC Discovery project that assesses the contribution of blogs and other forms of user-created content to public communication, this paper discusses the methodological challenges in developing a more comprehensive list of Australian blogs which may be used by researchers to study the Australian blogosphere in a more systematic and inclusive manner.

» continue reading...
Snurb — Saturday 10 July 2010 00:02

Finding the Australian Blogosphere

Blogs and Blogging | Social Media Network Mapping | ANZCA 2010 |

Canberra.


My own paper with Jean Burgess on our Discovery project mapping Australian blogs (and online publics more generally) is next at ANZCA 2010. I'm including the Powerpoint below, and this time I think the audio recording worked as well, so I'll add this as soon as possible, too. with audio recording!

In Search of Australian Blogs: Determining the Extent of the Contemporary Australian Blogosphere

View more presentations from Axel Bruns.

Technorati : ANZCA 2010, Australia, blogosphere, blogs, network mapping, politics

Del.icio.us : ANZCA 2010, Australia, blogosphere, blogs, network mapping, politics

» continue reading...
Snurb — Saturday 26 June 2010 15:46

The Collective Individualism of Activist Bloggers in Singapore

Politics | Government | Blogs and Blogging | ICA 2010 |

Singapore.


We're moving rapidly towards the conclusion of this ICA 2010 conference. The next session I'm attending starts with a paper by Carol Soon, whose interest is in activist bloggers. She notes the rise of net-activisim and transnational social movements. While the genesis of blogging lies in personal gratification, blogs also have a transformative power and can lead to greater civic engagement, by disseminating information and facilitating information exchange.

Previous studies have examined both bloggers' uses and gratifications as well as the hyperlinking and network structure of blogs and blogging; Carol's study adds to this by exploring the collective identity of Singapore activist bloggers and its role in engendering social action. Is there a tension betwen the individual and the collective?

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 25 June 2010 22:59

Mapping the Australian Networked Public Sphere (ICA 2010)

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | Social Media Network Mapping | ICA 2010 |

ICA 2010

Mapping the Australian Networked Public Sphere

Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Tim Highfield, Lars Kirchhoff, and Thomas Nicolai

  • 25 June 2010 - International Communication Association conference, Singapore
Mapping the Australian Networked Public Sphere

View more presentations from Axel Bruns.

This paper reports on a research program that has developed new methodologies for mapping the Australian political blogosphere (Bruns et al. 2009, 2008a/b; Kirchhoff et al. 2009). We improve on conventional Web crawling methodologies in a number of significant ways: First, we track blogging activity as it occurs, by scraping new blog posts when such posts are announced through RSS feeds, rather than by crawling existing content in the blogosphere after the fact. Second, we utilise custom-made tools that distinguish between the different types of content and thus allow us to analyse only the salient discursive content provided by bloggers, without contaminating our data with static links and ancillary material. Finally, we are able to examine these better-quality data by using both link network mapping and textual analysis tools, to produce both cumulative longer-term maps of interlinkages and themes across the blogosphere, and specific shorter-term snapshots of current activity which indicate clusters of heavy interlinkage and highlight key themes and topics being discussed within these clusters in the wider network.

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 25 June 2010 22:33

Mapping the Norwegian Blogosphere

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | Social Media Network Mapping | ICA 2010 |

Singapore.


The final speaker in this ICA 2010 session is Hallvard Moe, whose focus is also on mapping the blogosphere. What is its structure, as part of the wider public sphere; where are the borders of its community, and how communal is it -how are its interlinkages distributed?

Studies of the public sphere and online media tend to focus on specific 'noteworthy' forms of public communication and deliberation, but we need a wider definition of public communication than just 'political debate'. Blogs can be organised along a continuum spanned by the three axes of content (from internal to topical), directional (from monological to dialogical) and style (from intimate to objective); public sphere research tends to focus mainly on one point in that continuum, and we need to move beyond this.

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 25 June 2010 22:29

Mapping the Australian Networked Public Sphere

Blogs and Blogging | Social Media Network Mapping | ICA 2010 |

Singapore.


The post-lunch session at ICA 2010 this Friday starts with our own presentation on our large network mapping project, and I'm posting the Powerpoint below. No luck recording the audio this time, unfortunately - looks like my recorder is out of juice!

Mapping the Australian Networked Public Sphere

View more presentations from Axel Bruns.

Technorati : Australia, ICA 2010, blogs, network mapping, public sphere

Del.icio.us : Australia, ICA 2010, blogs, network mapping, public sphere

» continue reading...

Pagination

  • Previous page
  • 5
  • Next page
Blogs and Blogging
INFORMATION
BLOG
RESEARCH
PUBLICATIONS
PRESENTATIONS
PRESS
CREATIVE

Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

» more

Books, Papers, Articles

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

» more

Opinion and Press

Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

» more

Creative Work

Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

» more

Lecture Series


Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

Bluesky profile

Mastodon profile

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) profile

Google Scholar profile

Mixcloud profile

[Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence]

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.