The research proposal

How do bloggers use financial blogs?

I. Rationale:

This research seeks to shed light on a small part of the financial blogging phenomenon by
asking the following question: how do financial bloggers use their blogs.
Financial blogging is becoming a popular activity in the recent year. Several signs could demonstrate the increasing popularity of financial blogging. Karyn McCormack (2008) argues that recent events in the financial market have been “great fodder for the growing community of financial bloggers.” Blogpulse, a service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics found 178,435 messages on economic crisis; 217,705 messages on financial crisis; and 784,375 messages on economy over the period of last 6 months.
In the light of the recent Pew Research, which documented that often the press coverage of the economy state has lagged behind economic events, sometimes by months, the question posed by McCormack (2008) “where can you find the smartest, savviest takes on the markets and the economy?” becomes very relevant. One of the available resources of information on economy and finance matters could be financial blogs.
For the purposes of my study, I will define a financial blog as a blog, which is devoted to discussion of the financial and economy issues, is maintained by one person. To find the most popular financial blogs the researcher will use Google search.
In the current project the researcher will be looking at how the financial bloggers use their blogs. The coder will be reading the blog postings and making narrative descriptions of the specific blog uses. As an example, a financail blogger could use his blog to reflect on his life experience, or share with his/her opinions on the matters at hand. For the purpose of the current study the researcher does not employ any predetermined coding categories. The goal of the project is to generate data that will provide some insights on the financial blog use.

Subjects: the subject of the current study is the artifacts, i.e. a blog. A blog is a web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. The blog may contain archives of previous posts and a blogroll (a list of links to other blogs). For the purpose of the current study, for the web site to be considered a blog it should have at least blog posts that are displayed in reverse-chronological order.



Procedures: (a) For the current study, the researcher will look at financial blogs maintained by one individual. The researcher will analyze five most popular blogs returned by Google search. The results of the study will be used to develop the research instrument (categories of blog use), so the names or any other identification of the bloggers themselves will not be mentioned.