Blog Searching

Abstract

Blogs are web sites containing time-stamped postings written by one or more people and displayed in reverse chronological order. Blogs collectively form a fascinating new data source for social science research because there are so many of them—perhaps hundreds of millions—and they tend to be the informal thoughts or diaries of relatively ordinary people. For example, in principle, it would be possible to get a snapshot of public opinion related to any major topic by randomly sampling recent blog posts. Of course, bloggers are not typical citizens—they have Internet access and are probably relatively computer literate—but blog sampling can be achieved so quickly and easily that it can be a useful additional research technique for many investigations.