OSINFO - Open Sources Information

From: MountainRunner

Posted: 15 Apr 2008 12:55 PM CDT

There's an interesting report from Harvard's John Kelly and Bruce Etling.  Their paper, Mapping Iran's Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere, breaks some conceptions of Iranian bloggers and what they blog about.  Understanding who is saying what is critical in any information environment, but in the New Media environment of a simultaneous compression of time (instant communications) and suspension of time (persistency that permits time-shifted access to content), understanding the target audiences is more important.  It is also easier if you have the Rosetta Stone that bridges language, culture, shape and form.  As Kelly and Etling note,

...where there are topics of interest in a society, there will often be collection of blogs connected to each other (and to other online resources) by many links. This simple insight, on the scale of a society, nation, or linguistic community, has a remarkable implication. Unique as a snowflake, the network structure of a society’s blogosphere will reflect salient features of that society’s culture, politics, and history. A society’s online communities of interest, social factions, and major preoccupations can be seen and measured, their words read and analyzed, through a combination of structural and statistical analysis and textual interpretation.