Professor Greg Elmer of Ryerson University, who is also the Infoscape Director & Bell Globemedia Research Chair at Ryerson, alerted me to this new study seeing just how “partisan” bloggers in the Canadian political landscape are. Greg and I first met at the “Bloggers Room” last December at the Liberal Party Convention - he had been invited to the action partially I think to blog about us bloggers who were covering it and for research into the political blogging phenomenon. He had a few good chats with us, and he was also featured prominently in CPAC’s coverage of us at the Convention as well.
I won’t make any conclusions myself on the report; the only thing I will say is that I questioned Greg about how they came to decide who the “Top 20 Most Influential Bloggers” from each political blogging group looked at was, since that’s who they wanted to look at to be able to narrow it down and to use as research. His answer was that “It was an aggregation of three indicators: 1) total number of posts (over 3 months) 2) total number of comments, and 3) recommendations from other bloggers (partisan blogs: Liblogs, Blogging Tories, etc)”.
Of course, you can probably figure out my reply to him was that the research group should have taken into account blogging site traffic - which would have been the best factor of all in determining who was well-read. His reply is fair - blogging traffic is more or less private info and hard to get unless a blog publicizes it or is willing to give it out. I’d be willing to bet that a lot of bloggers would have given the team those #’s if they knew it was for a research project, and particularly since the report they’ve released don’t even mention the blogs in question that they looked at.
Anyhow, the Infoscapelab report and their findings is here. Feel free to leave feedback, as I’m sure he’d like some input back.
I’ve yet to go through it, but the title doesn’t surprise me.