September 26, 2008

Switching To Twitter in 5...4...3...

...2...1...

Tonight

I realize that I should spend the few remaining hours before the debate working on my dissertation, but I suspect that's not going to happen. Things are moving way too quickly in the political world today, and I've got a ton of blog-related reading to do before I can get to the theoretical stuff.

But wait.... blogs are my dissertation. Right! Let the blogging commence!

September 24, 2008

Back Tonight

I hadn't meant for this place to suddenly go dark these past few days, but I had a bunch of small projects hanging over my head that were getting in the way of my dissertation, and I decided to try and get them all done at once. The strategy worked, but it took far more time than I expected. Short version? I'll be back here tonight after teaching my political blogging class over at Tufts.

September 18, 2008

Hypocrisy

Leave it to Reason to take on Palin's pot smoking hypocrisy:

The upshot is that smoking marijuana in the privacy of one's home is just as legal in Alaska today as it was when Palin did it. Evidently she regrets this situation.


As mayor of Wasilla in 2000, Palin championed a city council resolution opposing a ballot initiative that would have legalized marijuana for adults. Last March her administration asked the Alaska Supreme Court to reverse its 1975 decision shielding private marijuana use, arguing that the drug is more dangerous than it used to be.

In other words, Palin got to smoke pot without worrying about legal consequences and now wants to deny that assurance to fellow Alaskans doing exactly the same thing. "Palin doesn't support legalizing marijuana," the Anchorage Daily News reported in 2006, because she worries about "the message it would send to her four kids."

It's Palin's job to teach her children that certain pleasures are reserved for grownups. The government should not continue to arrest adults who are harming no one simply because her children are easily confused.

Maybe when I have kids of my own I'll understand why so many people are terrified that their kids might follow in their footsteps, but I hope not. I've made the choices that I made, good and bad, and they've led me to this place and this moment. And I like it here. To regret my mistakes is to suggest that I wish things had turned out differently. And since I don't wish that...

Anyway, consider this yet another example of how conservatism has turned itself upside down. Palin's afraid of "the message" something might send to her kids, so she wants the government to ban it. Even if its something she once gladly and happily did herself. Ridiculous.

August 12, 2008

Two Updates

Time for a quick update or two...

+ First off, this blog. For most of the next two weeks, I'll expect to be entirely off the grid. I'm leaving Steamboat Springs early in the AM and heading southwest, all the way to Mesa Verde in the Four Corners. I'll be there for three days, and then head east to pick up G in Colorado Springs before heading back into the Great Sand Dunes for a few days. Then its back to Colorado Springs for a single night before heading into Rocky Mountain National Park for an entire week, the longest stretch I've ever spent in a single National Park.

My original plan for the trip was to do my usual longform Journeys By DJ thing, but after all the time I've spent doing data entry these past two weeks (more on that below), I just don't have it in me. So... instead I'll be tracking my journey through Twitter. From what I hear the iPhone Twitter apps are pretty phenomenal, and what better time to test them out than now? So.... Want to follow along? Now you can.

+ Second, the datamines. I've mentioned them quite a bit the past few weeks, but I don't think I've ever specifically mentioned what I've been doing there.

My original dissertation project was on campaign advertising and the electorate, but as I started working through the details this past winter and spring, I began to have some serious doubts. I still think my original project has merit, maybe even lots of it, but... it would require years worth of effort, and to be honest I'm just not sure I care enough about the topic right now to commit to that kind of effort.

So a few months back I made a switch. Forget TV and focus on blogs. I know... I know... that's where I should have always put my focus, right? Believe me, I've heard it a thousand different times in a hundred different ways. Trust me. It should have been obvious, right? It was obvious, I suppose, only I couldn't see it.

But now that I'm in, I'm all in. My project is going to track the interactions between the political blogosphere and the elite media during the fall election campaign. Using a tool called reBlog, I'll be collecting everything written on over 350 blogs from the first day of the convention until the week after the election. At the same time, I'll also be collecting everything written by 20 elite media sources - NYT, WaPo, CNN, Fox, AP, etc. Then, using a variety of social science network analysis tools, I'll start digging into the data to look for patterns.

But between now and then I'll need your help. I'm looking for two things, primarily. First and foremost, I'm looking for moments in the campaign when information, ideas, and memes cross over from the blogosphere into the elite media. Subtle is good, but I'm hoping for at least a small handful of examples that are somewhat obvious. If I can identify them, I should be able to use my database to track how they emerge and cross over into our elite media system, and if there are enough of them (hope! hope!) I may be able to outline some theories about how, when, and why these breakouts occur.

For those theories to be believable, however, I'll also need to identify how, when, and why these sorts of breakouts do not occur. And that, I suspect, is going to be much more difficult. Every day it seems the blogosphere has a new obsession, and in most cases those obsessions have little to no impact on the outside world. And usually that's as it should be. But every once in awhile the sphere gets its collective hands around something that seems certain to attract major attention, and then..... noting. If I can find identify those moments... if you guys can help me identify those moments.... I just might be able to start putting together a comprehensive description of the way the blogosphere and elite media world interact.

So that's where I am. I've spent the past month doing the hard work of building the feed collector, setting up the databases, normalizing the feeds, and entering all of the data. With the exception of the feeds for the bloggers credentialed for the Republican Convention (what are the folks at the RNC waiting for anyway in making the announcements about who these bloggers are, anyways?) its all ready to go. In a few months I'll have more data than I know what to do with. Needles and haystacks... So if you catch a glint of steel in the sunlight, let me know, OK?

And in the meantime.... Tweet!

August 8, 2008

Off to Steamboat!

So as of 2pm this afternoon my work commitments are done, so I'm heading north to the area around Steamboat Springs for a solid weekend of camping and hiking. I'll most definitely be off the grid until I check back into a hotel Sunday night. See you then - with pictures!

August 7, 2008

F*#k Comcast

So apparently Comcast Internet service was down yesterday for the entire Vail Valley. As a result, I'm now about 8 hours behind schedule on my data entry tasks. And tomorrow I leave for two days in the mountains before my last 2 days in a hotel for nearly two weeks. I've got a lot to do between now and tomorrow AM. As a result, blogging is highly unlikely between now and Sunday. If it happens, it will be brief, and it will be later tonight.

Here's hoping...

Want more? View Category Archives by month:
September 2008 (4)
August 2008 (3)
July 2008 (7)
June 2008 (2)
April 2008 (1)