Struggling with thinking on finding who belongs to a weblog community for a paper: there is no good way to define weblog community boundaries.
A very cynical perspective – what is included or not in a particular weblog community depends on:
Definition of a community used. There are all kinds of problems here, especially those about distingushing group – community – social network.
Dataset analysed. Including all weblogs in the analysis is almost impossible; in all other cases it’s about “where to start from?” and “when to stop?”. Selecting weblogs from a specific platform? Those self-selected in a list of “weblogs on X”? Snowballing?
Measures used to identify relations. For example those are likely to give different resutls: community as defined by linking, by common topic, by network of social relations between bloggers…
This post also appears on channel weblog research
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