Cynical perspective on defining weblog communities

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

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/05.html#a1414; comments are here.

• Generalising from own experiences when talking about weblogs
• Weblog research ethics
• WBC04: day 1

Tagged as: blog communities, blog research