Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: "Weblogs," or "blogs," constitute an emerging online media form whose prominence has grown in recent years. The 2004 US presidential election saw a new focus placed upon blogs as a political tool, which some believed to have the potential to revolutionize political reporting and discourse within the United States. Blogs were involved in political mobilization (including fund-raising activities) during the election cycle, and some blog authors were granted credentialed status at the DNC and RNC political conventions.

This paper explores how best to classify weblogs within the realm of political media. We examine several blogs networks by multiple time series models relating the evolution of structural properties such as density, centralization, and cohesion to changes in national and state level polling data during the last three and a half months leading up to the election. Our analysis tests the hypotheses that weblogs can be seen as either nascent political organizations or as political communication networks. Additionally it emphasizes the importance of studying large-scale networks as open systems, and demonstrates some useful techniques for future studies of network dynamics.