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Weblogs have been an increasingly influential component in the online political mediascape in the United States particularly since 2001 (Sweetser & Kaid, 2008, p. 72) accessed more than 28 million times throughout the electoral campaign, a number directly rivaling the audience of the three most-watched U.S. cable news networks during the same time period (Ward & Cahill, 2007). More recently, approximately 20% of U.S. campaign-savvy netizens got election-related information and commentary from weblogs during the 2006 U.S. Midterm elections (Rainie & Horrigan, 2006), up from 9% of Internet users who reported periodically accessing these communication channels for political news throughout the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign (Adamic & Glance, 2005). According to Sweetser and Kaid (2008), political blogs are “one of the key[s] in the growing popularity of blog reading” (p. 72).
Political blogs can be defined as publicly available and low-cost single or multi-authored Web-based publication channels with limited to no external editorial oversight when not affiliated to formal organizations providing mixed-media politically-oriented facts and opinions often ideologically-driven or partisan in nature, which are presented, updated as well as archived in reverse chronological order (Drezner & Farrell, 2008; Hargittai et al., 2008). Several multidisciplinary investigations targeting specific facets of the political blogspace have been conducted in recent years in many Western-style democratic national contexts such as Poland (e.g., Trammell et al., 2006), Sweden (e.g., Kullin, 2006), the United Kingdom (e.g., Coleman & Wright, 2008), Denmark (e.g., Klastrup & Pedersen, 2005), Germany (Albrecht et al., 2007) and Canada (e.g., Koop & Jansen, 2006, 2009). Social scientists have engaged in extensive content analyses of mostly highly-influential, or “A-list,” political blogs (Wallsten, 2005, 2007) as well as their readers’ input through feedback tools (Mishne & Glance, 2006). However, these scientific contributions only provide a partial and potentially distorted characterization of the structure and dynamics of the political blogosphere because they do not consider a large number of less read blogs that are maintained by “B-listers,” newcomers and other non-elite or “less salient” politically-interested individuals and organizations who might have a certain influence on public agenda-setting and discourse-structuring processes (Ackland & Shorish, 2009; Munger, 2008; Wallsten, 2007).
While some scholars have opted for descriptive quantitative reviews detailing with great precision these publication platforms’ content as well as structure (Singer, 2005; Herring et al., 2005), others have integrated qualitative concerns in their investigations to study, for example, the political and partisan orientation of blog posts (Koop & Jansen, 2006, 2009), bloggers’ self-introduction or positioning approaches, and ultimately to provide an extensive assessment of the political communication, mobilization and persuasion strategies employed by these formal and informal political actors (Trammell, 2006; Trammell et al., 2006). These analyses have contributed to the availability of data on blogging practices and ultimately the development of extensive categorizations of weblog genres (Herring et al., 2005; Hookway, 2008).