[Air-l] searching for genre-specific blogs

[Alex Halavais]

I'm curious as to what difficulties you've had with Technorati on this
count, since it seems pretty well suited to what you are trying for.
It's not representative of all blogs, but it is non-representative in
interesting ways.

The greatest difficulty, I think, is that there is no guarantee at all
that the content of a blog is related to a particular group or ethnic
identification. Profiles are available on several platforms, but these
rarely have people self-identifying by ethnicity.

Of course with any of these, you are tied to keyword choices. Another
approach might be to use key-sites rather than key words, if there are
a set of websites that are likely to be linked to from the group you
are trying to define. That is, linking patters to a small group of
sites might form a tacit community of sorts.

Finally, you could draw on an explicit, "ready made" self-identifying
community of bloggers. I am not aware of one that is specifically
inclusive of Asian Americans, as opposed to a subset thereof, or a
broader Asian focus (e.g., http://ricebowljournals.com/).

All that to say, I don't have a particularly good answer, but would be
interested in how you end up tackling the problem.

- Alex

On 4/13/06, Douglas Eyman <eymand at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> A colleague of mine is interested in researching Asian-Americans' use of
> Asian imagery in blogs -- but she wants limited-circulation blogs rather
> than high-profile/high traffic ones. The question I bring to this group
> of people who are particularly smart about methodological issues
> regarding Internet research is this: are there methods/mechanisms/search
> engines that might help find such specific resources?
>
> She has tried using Google (of course), and I have suggested using
> blogstreet to trace connections that might lead to the kinds of blogs
> she is interested, as well as searching via technorati (with which I've
> had fairly limited success in my own blog searching activities).
>
> The trick, methodologically, is to find blogs that meet the criteria she
> is interested in -- in a way that might be considered representative of
> Asian-American blogs.
>
> Any help or resources you can suggest would be very much appreciated,
> and I thank this community for all the interesting and useful things
> I've learned from this list in the past.
>
> Douglas Eyman
> Rhetoric and Writing,
> Michigan State University
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--
//
// Alexander Halavais
// Graduate Director of Informatics
// University at Buffalo School of Informatics
// http://alex.halavais.net
//