Locating the Australian Blogosphere: Towards a New Research Methodology

The blogosphere allows for the networked, decentralised, distributed discussion and deliberation on a wide range of topics. Based on their authors ’ interests, only a subset of all blogs will participate in any one topical debate. Even within such debates, there will be an uneven distribution of participation based on a variety of sociocultural factors: • the time available for any individual blogger to participate, • the blogger’s level of interest in the topic, • the blogger’s awareness of other blogs discussing the topic (which they may link and respond to), • the blogger’s status amongst their peers (which may determine how aware others are of the blog, and thus whether they will read, comment on, link to, or respond to the blogger’s posts), • the quality of the blogger’s writing and contributions, • the blogger’s specific interests in the topic (which may lead them to focus on particular aspects of the wider topic), • and additional factors including the blogger’s political ideology, gender, age, location, sociodemographic status (to the extent that these are evident from the blog), as well as the language they write in. In combination, these factors mean that networked debate on specific topics in the blogosphere is characterised by clusterin