Final Report

Title: Issue publics on the web: Applying network theory to the war blogosphere. Author(s): Mark Tremayne, Nan Zheng, Jae Kook Lee, Jaekwan Jeong

This paper the primary objectives is to examine the predictors of preferential attachment in the war blog network.

As popular communication channels, blogs occupy an inter-connected space, the blogosphere, where people can express and discuss their opinions at minimal expense. The blogs’ potential for individuation has drawn scholarly attention to the blogosphere, in that each blog may seem to present a collection of idiosyncratic information and opinions. The uniqueness of blog contents, therefore, makes the blogosphere a testing ground for comparing news coverage by blogs and by mainstream media.

These so-called war blogs typically evolved to include discussion of politics and current events, offer a means for entering into public discourse, essentially becoming another way to participate in the political sphere.

Moreover, because the blogosphere is heavily interlinked with journalism websites, the spread of information from the media to the public and vice versa is increasingly affected by bloggers who, if not already serving as opinion leaders, at least provide a window into the process of opinion formation.

In the war blogosphere, the bloggers have highly educated a significant percentage holding graduate or law degrees. especially, three professional backgrounds emerged as the most common: academics, professional writers or journalists, and technology industry. They usually have a quality of writing, although not measured for this study, is likely a significant predictor of success in the blogosphere.