So, blame it all on the military! Against this backdrop, we can begin to examine the roles bloggers and blogging played
during the electoral process.
4. DATA AND METHODOLOGY
Blogging is a recent phenomenon in the Nigerian democratic culture. Actually, the 2007 electoral process was the first
time in Nigerian history in which blogging played significant role for mobilization, monitoring and measuring the
success or otherwise of elections. Using the Nigerian Blog Aggregator (http://nigerianbloggers.com), blog entries from
8 January 2005 to 2 January 2008 are culled as data for this study. Our query phrase “nigeria + 2007 + elections”
irrespective of the ordering of the query elements yield 245 blog posts which are representative of the actual number of
blogs related to the 2007 General Elections as shown in Table 1:
Table1: Reverse Chronological Summary of 2007 Elections-related Blog Posts
Date
Activities
Number of
Posts
%
22 April 2007 – 02 January
2008
Post-General Elections
67
27.3
21 April 2007
Presidential & National Assembly Elections
2
0.8
15 – 20 April 2007
Post-Gubernatorial & State Houses of Assembly
Elections
14
5.7
14 April 2007
Gubernatorial & State Houses of Assembly
Elections
6
2.4
08 January 2005 – 13 April
2007
Pre-Elections Socialization & Mobilization
156
63.7
We decided to do a reverse summary of the blogs since this is the format of actual blogging. Then for some unknown
reasons, using other query elements (e.g. 'election') aggregate a lot of unrelated blog posts. This is why we restrict the
query items to the above mentioned phrase.
The blog data sequentially divide into three groups: pre-elections (dealing mostly with voters' registration and
preparation for the events), the April elections (held on the 14th and 21st April, 2007) and the post-elections blogs. For
the sake of precision, however, we decided to further specify the quantity of blog posts which relate to the five
significant group of activities stated in Table 1 .
8 / 20
Convention