Blogging In English Canada

 The results of the Blogging Common survey, which many of us participated in earlier in the year, can be found here.  Interesting stuff, if not particularly surprising.  One of their more notable results, perhaps, is this:

Typical bloggers spend a third of their blogs writing about their personal lives; highly linked to bloggers tend to share commentary and opinion.

On average, “diary and personal experience” makes up 36% of the content on blogs written by English-language bloggers. Popular bloggers spend only 18% of their blogs writing about their personal lives and 48% on commentary and opinion.

I was interviewed as part of their pool of "popular" bloggers and I will note that I hardly ever write about myself per se, under the assumption that this would bore readers. 

A 2nd notable survey result is that, among "highly linked-to" bloggers, the single most popular posting topic is Politics.  I suppose that's not surprising either; writing/reading about politics doesn't require a great degree of specialized knowledge-- its actually fairly difficult to have your views proven definitively wrong--and so while everyone has an opinion, nobody is afraid to weigh in with it.

More On The News Cycle

From the Journalism Lab, more commentary on Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle. Here the J-Lab author (Zachary M. Seward) disputes the contention (ascribed to the NY Times but really straight from the paper itself) that blogs follow the MSM (as shown in figure above):

Back to Kleinberg’s idea of the web as a “single organism.” The study found that, yes, memes peak on prominent websites — that is, those indexed by Google News — before less prominent ones, but both of those peaks are generally preceded by a blip on the less prominent sites. Here’s how it’s illustrated in the paper;

The authors describe this as a “‘heartbeat’-like dynamic” or a series of handoffs between blogs and mainstream media. My hunch is that the heartbeat would be even more visible — healthier, you might say — if the study had made a more-precise distinction between mainstream media and blogs. But in any event, the finding explodes that worn-out notion, furthered by today’s Times piece, of parasitic blogs merely reacting to the work of professional journalists.

This suggests the possibility that news is typically "found" by the blogosphere (the early blip on less prominent sites), and then widecast by the MSM, and then, finally, further chewed over one more time in the blogs. Here's the relevant passage from the paper:

Figure 9 shows a “heartbeat”-like like dynamics where the phrase “oscillates” between blogs and mainstream media. The fraction of blog volume is initially constant, but it turns upward about three hours before the peak as early bloggers mention the phrase. Once the news media joins in, around t = 􀀀1, the fraction of blog volume drops sharply; but it then jumps up after t = 0 once the news media begins dropping the thread and blogs continue adopting it...

The question I have: do the early media reports typically precede or follow the early blog reports?

Another thing I've noticed is that the original paper's discussion of the 3.5% of stories in which the MSM appears to follow the blogs (in the top graph, the green line would peak 1s in such cases) is a bit obscure. The paper's table 2 give several examples, one of which is:

Well uh you know I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or uh a scientific perspective uh answering that question with specificity uh you know is uh above my pay grade.

This is a response from now-President Obama to a question posed by him in an interview with Rick Warren. But it does not appear to me to show a piece of news discovered in the blogosphere, and then launched into the MSM. Rather, the interview was quite heavily covered in the MSM (at least as I remember it), which is where the original phrase would have appeared. It was the percieved inadequacy of Obama's response that got batted about the blogosphere, and was then recirculated through the major news outlets.

So it doesn't answer the (to me) important question: how much primary news are bloggers getting to 1st (in which direction does the 1st handoff go--from blogs to MSM or MSM to blogs)?

Blogger Fears Getting Kicked Out Of The Sandbox Of Eden

Hogwash. That is my one word response response to the panicked and childish reactions by Stageleft and other bloggers to Joseph Brean's piece on Marc Lemire's constitutional challenge to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. The passage that seems to have set everyone off is:

Anyone who runs an online message board, from the lowliest vanity blogger to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, can be charged under federal human rights law if visitors to their site post hateful comments, according to the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Cue the outrage! Bloggers might actually have to pay attention to their comments section! Well, presumably they are already doing that, aren't they? To make sure any honest to god defamation doesn't occur? No? For them the act of maintaining a blog is, then, the intellectual equivalent of masturbating in public, where one just spews pointlessly and flees?

But lets just see how difficult it would be to spot the kind of material Section 13 is designed to regulate:

...the material for which Mr. Lemire is accused, including 50 to 100 separate messages on his freedomsite.org and another site with which he is associated, is "voluminous," "vile" and "more than offensive."

Boy, that kind of stuff would be sooo difficult to distinguish from the insults and casual racism that can pervade a typical blog's comment section. And, if pointed out to the blog owner, would be sooooo difficult to remove.

I'll tell you what, Stageleft (and Kate, and others) most of the material that appears on your blog is frankly too lame to approach actual hate speech. I, on the other hand, know all eight words for "fuck-head" in !Kung. If I'm not worried about running afoul with the CHRC, why should a bunch of bed-wetters, leaf-eaters, and thumb-suckers be afraid?

...well, I suppose to some extent we all fear taking responsibility, don't we?

Blogger Threatens Harper With Death, Gets Away With It

I don't recall the incident that precipitated this case at all, perhaps because "almost nobody visited the blog" in question (and it seems to have disappeared). And the Phantom Observer is the only blogger that seems to have reported on it back in March. Note that this guy is not Allen Varlaki, who once suggested that Harper should have to "take a bullet", although the two incidents both took place in March '07.

But the bottom line seems to be that death threats uttered in the direction of famous people are okay in the context of satire:

....the blog entries were the result of a creative process where he would write as the angry and disillusioned character, Drunken Soldier, poking fun at the idea of blogging and current events.

But of course one can also satirize the non-famous. What happens when you began to issue fictitious death threats against a fellow blogger or the girl who won't go out with you in college?