Discussion of eParticipation topics in greek political blogs

Abstract

Blogs are an effective way to participate in politics and have the potential to support eParticipation. Political discourse is formed through hypertext links, blogrolls, posts and opinionated commentary, calls to political action, and requests for feedback. The paper applies a methodology to locate focal conversational points within the blogosphere. These take shape as central clusters of blogs having many incoming links. Next, the paper investigates the communication patterns among these focal points and associates the findings to the content of blogs participating in these focal points. Through statistical analysis and content analysis it is shown that linkage patterns among focal point blogs are reproduced to content similarities.