Halavais, Alexander

Blogs and the "Social Weather"

Abstract

One of the original hopes for content analysis of mass media was that it would be possible to uncover what Tenney called the "Social Weather," the sea changes in popular opinion on a global scale. The Internet provides the most popular platform for semi-permanent publication available today, but the Web as a whole remains relatively static. The exception has become personal and group web logs, publicly available diaries that are updated relatively frequently. Many have suggested that these represent a very rich source of data, and projects like MIT's blogdex represent attempts to come to some view of their meaning as a whole.

This paper describes a small step in this larger project. By measuring changes in word frequency within a large set of popular blogs over a period of four weeks, and comparing these changes to those in the "traditional" media represented on the web, we are able to come to a better understanding of the nature of the content found on these sites. This view is further refined by clustering those blogs that carry similar content. While those who blog may not be very representative of the public at large, charting discourse in this way presents an interesting new window on public opinion.