Comparative Studies of Blogs and Other Online Journalism

This page contains a number of research projects I've undertaken in order better study blogs and other online journalism comparatively.

Recently I have come up with a list of 25 online publishing efforts-- blogs, near-blogs, webzines-- which cover U.S. politics. This has served as the basis for the following two reports:

• Online Political Writers Scorecard
• Online Political Writers: Reactions to the Tsunami

One of the analysis pieces to come out of this was a hypothesis about blogger archetypes-- different motivations why people blog. I'd like to test this and other difference:

• Intent: What is the publisher's intention?
• Online Personality Census: How do writers identify themselves?
• Architecture: How is the content structured?
• Legitimacy: How responsible is the publication to its readers?

Previous work in the beginning of 2004 focused on the visual layout of websites:

• Web Page Lengths -- study of blog lengths
• Web Page Widths -- study of news websites