Last week after submitting the proposal, I was finally able to concentrate on identifying the method of data collection. It is really a challenge. If we are looking at blogs in general, there is no really complete category of the blogs. Another issue the abandonment rate of the blogs is high, people start a blog and then don't have time to maintain it, so it is not really an active blog any more...
If we look just at financial blogs, Technocrati has a directory of business, financial and economy blogs. So I thought it was a good place to start. But at the same time, I have to be aware that not all financial blogs are indexed by technocrati, I may assume that probably the most popular ones probably are.
So, what I decided to do is still use the Technocrati directory of financial blogs and choose five of the blogs that have the highest authority.
The authority is defined as the amount of other blogs linked to your own blog. So it is kind of makes sense if your blog is popular you will probably have a lot of links from other blogs. This is the way how bloggers demonstrate the popularity, that the blog has a readership.
Thinking about some presence of random sample, I decided to choose blog posts published during 4 weeks randomly selected. So in this way the data is not skewed by any of the media or governemnt discussions of certain economy topics. Although it would be interesting to see if the bloggers discussed the same topics as media did, i.e. function as "echo chamber" to the mainstream media. But to do this kind of study I had to analyze media coverage as well.
My first plunge in the financial blogs really amazed me. I was impressed by several things: some highly popular blogs had Google search function on their website, I was able to search their archive using Google. That really enhanced my user experience with a blog !!!! The majority of the blogs tend to provide their email and talk abou thier occupation. So bloggers are very open to the feedback and do not try to hide behind the nicknames, ofcourse it does not apply to all blogs, just a few I looked at.
In terms of the topics the bloggers discussed I am sure that I will learn about economy, personal finances, etc by reading those blogs. Maybe I will even follow one of them very closely. So in all respects, it is a very educational study!!!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Your project is an interesting one with a lot of potential. With the information the bloggers give you then you can certainly take a number of different approaches -- and can even conduct interviews or surveys in the future if you decide to pursue this subject more. I think it might be interesting to see if different types of bloggers gravitate toward different blog sites. For example, are blogger bloggers different from wordpress bloggers etc.
Post a Comment