Election bloggers: Methods for determining political influence

Abstract

This paper discusses early findings and methodological pitfalls of a study of a hyper–mediated election campaign in Canada. Web logs — or “blogs” — serve as the primary object of study. The paper focuses on possible sources of large scale data (aggregated blogger posts) and methods of determining the political influence of bloggers. A series of methodologies are proposed to resolve the over–reliance upon information aggregators and blog search engines provided by Google and Technorati.