There will be a specialised track focusing on Politics 2.0 and political publics online to which I will contribute some of the findings of my recent work on WriteToThem.com. Among the variety of activists presenting for example insights from the Obama campaign it will be my role to provide some empirical data from a large and successful eDemocracy project, serving as a reminder of the fact that the problems of political participation are not easily solved by technology.

Last year doctoral students of the OII went to the conference as part of our student trip to Berlin. This year again a delegation of the Oxford Internet Institute will be in Berlin as co-located with re:publica there will be the PrivacyOS conference of the European Privacy Open Space project that is promoted by the Oxford Internet Institute.

Ok, here is the task: Automatically query Google Blogsearch to find the number of “all” English-language blog posts containing a number of words that have been published during a certain period. Should be easy enough? Well, you have no idea…

Before I start, why to use Google Blogsearch anyway? This is why: Technorati does not allow to limit the time for searches, Blogpulse does not offer to filter languages and is very slow anyway and last but not least Bloglines, while doing a good job in general, reports less results than Google and also gives very erroneous estimates for total post counts.

First problem: Index update intervalls

At first sight Google Blogsearch is great. For any kind of search Google will usually show you some posts that have just been published. This is great but clearly Google simply cannot index all blogs at the same time. The crawler will visit less frequently updated blogs less frequently and even then we don’t know when Google updates the Blogsearch index. If you are interested in “all” posts that have been published in the last week (or at least all posts that have been published on blogs Google tends to index), you should better wait to query Google Blogsearch until the index has been updated to include all those posts that have been written in the last week but have yet to make it into the index.

But how long should you wait? I’ve used a random sample of 500 queries that were first submitted to Google exactly two days after the period of interest and repeated those searches again. I divided the newly obtained result by the initial ones (so this should be 1 if no change in total post count or larger than one if more posts were found in the second query) and plotted them by days that have passed since the date of interest.

What you can see is that first of all that there is a huge variation in the counts, so usually you will even receive a lower total count if you query Google Blogsearch after some days. However, this is a problem in Google’s estimation techniques and I will deal with that later. What can be seen is that there is a clear increase in posts starting about 10-12 days after the period of interest. Ergo, it is probably safe to assume that Google has completely updated the Blogsearch index after a two week interval – assuming that the index is updated continuously. Clearly this experiment should be repeated to be safe that we not just hit the middle of for example a 4-week cycle.

In contrast, below is a picture of Yahoo News. As one would expect, there is less variation because this search has a lesser number of outlets to index and crucially relies on being up to date.

First lesson learned: If you really want all posts published at day X from all blogs Google indexes, wait about two weeks from day X onwards before you do your query.

Second problem: total result estimates

As you probably know, basically the number Google reports for the total number of results is an estimate – and a VERY bad one. The reason is that Google cannot be bothered to really search for ALL posts containing a word if 99.9% of people are only interested in the top 10 ie. most relevant ones. Therefore it just checks the most relevant ones and by some magic produces an estimate of what the total number is likely to be. Once you start browsing through the list of results you will likely find out there are much less results than originally indicated. Need a proof? See the screenshot below:

The interesting bit is that Google will give you 649 results (as you can see there is no way to request more) but still it claims there would be a total of 2,088 results which is clear rubbish (Note that this does already include the duplicates!)

Second lesson learned: Do not, never and by no means use the total result estimate. Instead, use the number of the last result Google returns. This has the problem that Google will never return more than a 1,000 results.

Third problem: The same query will give different results (just keep trying)

Taking the lessons learned from problem one and two you could just construct a query that asks Google for the last results page straight away (ie. you append &start=990 to your query). However, if you do the same query again you often obtain a different, usually higher, number of results. Give this one a try. Initially it brought something in the region of 600 results, then it were 900 and if you play long enough (by browsing a bit through the list) you may get to a 1000. Again it seems like Google is not putting much energy into the first query but once you do the second it has already a head start and will give you more.

Third lesson learned: In order to get a more accurate number from Google, do a query for the top ten results first and after a few seconds, do another one for the last results page.

Fourth problem: different results from feed and interface

This really, really, really is just annoying. You will obtain different results if you do exactly the same query and access the results via the user interface or via the XML feed.

Fourth lesson learned: Decide for one way of accessing the results and stay with it to allow to compare the obtained counts. The feeds seems to return the higher number of results.

Fifth problem: Google is sorry…

Well, just when you think you have solved all your problems (at least related to this search thing…), Google blocks your access. I have yet to figure out why exactly as the policy is somehow inconsistent (sometimes it happens very quickly, sometimes it takes half a day) but apparently Google does not like queries for the last results page – which is no wonder as it requires more computing power. When only checking for the top 10 results I never got the following page:

This seems to be unrelated to whether one is using the normal web interface or the XML feed.

No lesson to be learned here…

On SPAM

One problem that keeps cropping up is SPAM. You can never totally eliminate bogus blogs that were just set up to generate some ad revenue and lure unsuspecting people to dubious business offers. But why for some queries posts like the one below do get included in droves is totally beyond me.

This seems to be a particular problem with blogs on (Google’s) blogspot platform that has loads of automatically generated blogs. I try to treat SPAM posts as random error, hoping that it will affect all queries equally (and this really is only a hope…).

Last words

I hope this is going to help some people who also need some reliable counts on the number of posts dealing with a certain topic. In my research area, this certainly is an issue. What is more, let me know if you have more or different experiences so that we can learn from each other. btw most of these findings should also be true for Google search more generally.

Finally, of course one has to be somehow grateful to Google to at least provide a service like that for free (yeah, I know they do ads). But what really sucks is that Google sits on the data and could give you all the numbers you need straight away with 99% accuracy. So to end with my usual plea: open up your index and make it accessible (at least for research purposes)!!!!

Kevin gave a very good overview about the influence of the blogosphere on the US elections and his work with the BBC. Along the way he made a more general point about how blogs are fundamentally changing the media landscape. My colleague Alejandro has not only organized this event but he has also taken great effort to provide a podcast (complete with the slides, hey!).

Kevin had the brilliant idea of continuing the conversation on his blog and provided some follow-up on issues that came up during the talk. This is a great example of blog use and I think that we should encourage ourselves and our speakers to do that more often!

Given that many journalists are highly suspicious of these emerging forms of citizen journalism Kevin’s job cannot be fun all the time. I share Kevin’s opinion that too many established writers just don’t get what is going on. Yes, you will not swap the New York Times for your favourite blog(s) but this misses the point. Blogs provide a commentary to the media, a way to express opinion as well as to network.

As a matter of fact I was challenging him as to why media companies such as the BBC or the Guardian should spent money at all on blogging. So here are my top reasons why big media companies should NOT blog:

1. Journalists and their employers do already have a voice in the public sphere, they do not need yet another channel to get their take on issues across.
2. Most of these corporate blogs just don’t work. They are not written in the spirit of blogging, they are not looking for a real dialog (something they share with blogs of politicians) and aim only to co-opt bloggers into giving the media company some form of credibility.
3. The money spent on developing these platforms should rather be invested into the core business of news providers, e.g. in foreign correspondents and investigative stories (ie. the things that are most difficult for citizen journalists).

Kevin made some interesting points (see below) but a lot of it would refer to the ability of using user-generated content to enhance traditional reporting (think commuter’s pictures of London bombings etc.) which is a great development but does not need blogging journalists.

So, journalists should not blog. However, being an academic I of course argue “well, it is not that simple” (some self-criticism on my tribe here). There are some arguments in favour of blogging journalists:

1. I buy Kevin’s argument that in order to leverage the wisdom of the blog crowds one needs some sort of credibility that is best obtained by being part of the sphere.
2. In his follow-up post he also mentioned that blogs are a way of re-connecting journalists to their audience. If that is indeed happening (ie. there is a genuine wish for a real dialogue) this would indeed be a great argument for blogging journalists.
3. Highly visible blog spaces such as the Guardian site can be a platform that helps the average blogger to attain some form of publicity by commenting on them.

Summarizing I do not see a problem with blogging journalists, on the contrary as long as they do it privately I think it is great if they get involved. What is more, I think Kevin makes an interesting cross between the two worlds so watch his space! But I am still not convinced its worth the money of the BBC or the Guardian to develop dedicated blog platforms.

PS: Just could not resist once I came across this nice cartoon:

I am happy to share with you that I will be able to present this ongoing work at the General Online Research conference 2008 (GOR) in Hamburg (March 10-12). GOR is organised by the German Society for Online Research (DGOF) but it brings together academics from around the world. It is well worth checking out the archive for the papers presented there in the past.

In Hamburg I will present in the session on Online Journalism and in the running up to this event I had already the great opportunity to discuss this piece of work with my DPhil colleagues here at the Oxford Internet Institute. The incredibly useful feedback I received from them is a true sign of what a remarkable group of people this still very young DPhil programme has brought together.

Now looking forward to get more feedback and to network with other researchers in Hamburg!

I have been thinking of a way to test whether the blogosphere really does constitute a counter public. I have developed a tool that compares the media agenda – that is a ranking of stories reported within 24 hours – to the blogging agenda and measures the overlap between the two. The main objective is to find out whether bloggers are applying different criteria to rank the importance (salience) of a news story than traditional journalists.

My paper describes it in more detail but basically I construct the agenda from the stories on Google News, extract the key words for each story with the Yahoo Term Extractor and search with the help of Google Blog Search how many posts cover this story. You can have a look at the data on this website but you will realise that data collection stopped some time ago.

In due course there will be an update of the tool along with the paper that will improve the data reliability but for now I very much welcome your feedback on it!

The main purpose of these round tables is to bring together people at the OII that are actively blogging or at least have an interest in doing so, in particular given the rather recent introduction of blogs to the OII (such as the one your are just reading).

The discussion at our first meeting did center around the purpose of having a blog as a researcher. Here are some of the perceived benefits of having a blog:

• getting feedback for your own research, generating interaction with like-minded people
• checking on your progress
• marking your territory
• learning how to present your research to the public

It was mentioned that for some of those effects you would not necessarily need a blog but could do with a static website as long as it is up to date (such as this example). The latter being of great importance: A blog needs a certain sustained commitment or it won’t interest readers.

However, despite the potential benefits there were also some doubts and criticism concerning blogging:

• blogs won’t help to get academic connections (because this happens by other means, eg conferences)
• blogs do not impact on academic metrics (just icing on the cake)
• there might be a perception of blogging about research as being not academic
• putting up your research idea might help others to plagiarise your work

A particular dimension is added by the fact that the OII blogs are somehow corporate, therefore bringing up the question of what is acceptable and unacceptable posting. While a blog is quasi by definition personal in nature there are obviously limits to sharing private stories on a departmental blog. Everybody agreed that the idea of distinguishing between the category OIINews (that is syndicated on people.oii.ox.ac.uk) as “official” and all the other categories as “private” does make sense – but the distinction is at times difficult to make.

Another issue arising from corporate blogs is a certain sense of obligation to blog as it might be expected from a proper Internet researcher. However, no one could see how forced blogging would produce any useful contribution to an academic institution or the Web at large.

It was also mentioned that it is difficult to find a certain tone of voice on your blog if you do not know who your audience is. To this end our web team shared some of the audience statistics for the blogs with us. They did so rather reluctantly as not to disappoint and kill off the enthusiasm because basically readership so far is very low. Given some inaccuracies in measuring they put the number to several 1000 visits a month with RSS feeds on top of that but without distinguishing for unique users or people from within the department. Most of the traffic goes to the director’s blog so external readership for the rest is pretty much tiny.

While size of the audience might not be as important as the quality of feedback there was widespread agreement that the the numbers would need to go up. This can be achieved by quality content primarily but there might also be some technical tweaks to increase audience. The first thing however will be to actually get a proper statistics package to obtain useful stats for the OII blogosphere.

So much my summary from a meeting about two months ago. Feel free to add and comment.

btw, who is summarising this weeks round table?

btw: a very cool idea are comments to the presentation via SMS that get subsequently displayed on a big video screen next to the speaker. It’s heavily used but rarely for questions or comments to the ongoing presentation. Still, very entertaining

I already mentioned some people that I’ve met here and that have set up German alternatives to del.ico.us and digg. Funnily enough I also met people here that I wanted to meet in the UK but didn’t manage yet: Hello to Tom Steinberg. As a premature resume after the first day: there is a lot more going on here than I anticipated and there is also more collaboration happening than expected.

One of the interesting presentation here was from Jan Schmidt who is working at Forschungsstelle “Neue Kommunikationsmedien” in Bamberg. His aim was to clarify three big myth about the blogosphere – he is in a good position to do so because he is the author of the biggest German blogger survey to date. He identifies three myth about the blogosphere:

1. bloggers are nerds
2. blogs consitute an alternative (counter) public sphere
3. blogs are irrelevant

myth 1: bloggers are nerds

The main stereotype of bloggers is that they are male, overweight and unsocial. However, Jan argued that most of the studies to date are not representative. His own research has shown that there is rather a balance between male and female bloggers with another important study by Harders/Hesse even arguing for a blogosphere that is to two thirds female.

myth 2: blogs are a counter public sphere

Jan argued that blogs cannot be called counter-cultural because they mainly quote established news media and talk a lot about the personal lives of the bloggers. I don’t fully buy his argument because quoting news media does not mean one just mirrors the mainstream opinion. I’m writing a paper that compares the agenda of the mainstream media with the blogosphere that will hopefully contribute some data to this discussion but more on this another time.

myth 3: blogs are irrelevant

Interestingly an argument that also comes from bloggers themselves in order to distinguish themselves other blogs. Jan rightly argues that this myth is created by applying the relevance criteria of the traditional mass media system. However, for most bloggers it is not important to get a big readership but their blogs serve a different purpose: connecting with like-minded people, keeping in touch with friends etc. If their blogs can achieve that goal, they have a personal relevance for these bloggers regardless of the fact that they are irrelevant to 99% of Internet users.

More is to come so stay tuned …