Do bloggers’ opinions matter?
Do bloggers’ opinions matter? And if so, how to measure them? This was the topic of the higher research seminar conducted by Olessia Koltsova at the School of media and communications at Södertörn university, Stockholm, on April 22, 2014.
Do bloggers’ opinions matter? And if so, how to measure them? This was the topic of the higher research seminar conducted by Olessia Koltsova at the School of media and communications at Södertörn university, Stockholm, on April 22, 2014. Bloggers generate gigabytes of content, much of which is publicly available. It, in turn, may exercise influence on blog readers and promote their blogging activity as well. This could have been considered unimportant chat, if only blogs’ content was not correlated with electoral results, share prices and sales. One of such patterns of influence was studied by Laboratory for Internet Studies. The research revealed connection between pro- / anti-government sentiment of posts written by popular bloggers and electoral ratings of parties and candidates in Russia. But how these opinions may be extracted from enormous volume of online data? More than 150 million blogs are indexed in Russia only. LINIS has got a large experience in processing and analyzing such data. Experiments show that blogs below approximately the 150,000th place in Russian LiveJournal’s rating of popularity are mostly either empty or spammy. This means that Russian LJ that numbers to 2 million accounts may be easily shrunk by 13 times. Moreover, there seems to be no substantial difference in topic composition and length of posts contributed by ordinary versus most popular bloggers. Still, meaningful samples tend to comprise hundreds of thousands of texts, impossible to read by a human. This is where automatic text analysis comes into play. More information on this may be found in the Lab’s publications «Mapping the Public Agenda with Topic Modeling: The Case of the Russian LiveJournal», «'LiveJournal Libra!’: The political blogosphere and voting preferences in Russia in 2011–2012» and others.