Measuring internet activity: a (selective) review of methods and metrics

Two Decades after the birth of the World Wide Web, more than two billion people around the world are Internet users. The digital landscape is littered with hints that the affordances of digital communications are being leveraged to transform life in profound and important ways. The reach and influence of digitally mediated activity grow by the day and touch upon all aspects of life, from health, education, and commerce to religion and governance. This trend demands that we seek answers to the biggest questions about how digitally mediated communication changes society and the role of different policies in helping or hindering the beneficial aspects of these changes. Yet despite the profusion of data the digital age has brought upon us—we now have access to a flood of information about the movements, relationships, purchasing decisions, interests, and intimate thoughts of people around the world—the distance between the great questions of the digital age and our understanding of the impact of digital communications on society remains large. A number of ongoing policy questions have emerged that beg for better empirical data and analyses upon which to base wider and more insightful perspectives on the mechanics of social, economic, and political life online. This paper seeks to describe the conceptual and practical impediments to measuring and understanding digital activity and highlights a sample of the many efforts to fill the gap between our incomplete understanding of digital life and the formidable policy questions related to developing a vibrant and healthy Internet that serves the public interest and contributes to human wellbeing. Our primary focus is on efforts to measure Internet activity, as we believe obtaining robust, accurate data is a necessary and valuable first step that will lead us closer to answering the vitally important questions of the digital realm. Even this step is challenging: the Internet is difficult to measure and monitor, and there is no simple aggregate measure of Internet activity—no GDP, no HDI. In the following section we present a framework for assessing efforts to document digital activity. The next three sections offer a summary and description of many of the ongoing projects that document digital activity, with two final sections devoted to discussion and conclusions

Exploring Russian Cyberspace: Digitally-Mediated Collective Action and the Networked Public Sphere

This paper summarizes the major findings of a three-year research project to investigate the Internet's impact on Russian politics, media and society. We employed multiple methods to study online activity: the mapping and study of the structure, communities and content of the blogosphere; an analogous mapping and study of Twitter; content analysis of different media sources using automated and human-based evaluation approaches; and a survey of bloggers; augmented by infrastructure mapping, interviews and background research. We find the emergence of a vibrant and diverse networked public sphere that constitutes an independent alternative to the more tightly controlled offline media and political space, as well as the growing use of digital platforms in social mobilization and civic action. Despite various indirect efforts to shape cyberspace into an environment that is friendlier towards the government, we find that the Russian Internet remains generally open and free, although the current degree of Internet freedom is in no way a prediction of the future of this contested space

The case against the democratic influence of the internet on journalism

Book synopsis: Web Journalism: A New Form of Citizenship provides a much-needed analytical account of the implications of interactive participation in the construction of media content. Although web journalism is a fast-changing technology this book will have sustained appeal to an international readership by seeking to critically assess Internet news production. … With the rise of blogging and citizen journalism, it is a commonplace to observe that interactive participatory media are transforming the relationship between the traditional professional media and their audience. A current, popular, assumption is that the traditional flow of information from media to citizen is being reformed into a democratic dialogue between members of a community. The editors and contributors analyse and debate this assumption through international case studies that include the United Kingdom and United States. … While the text has been written and designed for undergraduate and postgraduate use, Web Journalism: A New Form of Citizenship? will be of use and of interest to all those engaged in the debate over Web reporting and citizen journalism

Blogging the 2006 FIFA World Cup Finals

This study focuses on the use of new technologies by the sports-media complex, looking specifically at the 2006 FIFA World Cup Finals. Combining the world's single largest sports media event with one of the most current, complex forms of Web-based communication, this article explores extent to which football fans embedded in Germany used the Internet to blog their World Cup experiences. Various categories of blog sites were identified, including independent bloggers, bloggers using football-themed Web sites, and blogs hosted on corporate-sponsored platforms. The study shows that the anticipated "democratizing potential" of blogging was not evident during Germany 2006. Instead, blogging acted as a platform for corporations, which, employing professional journalists, told the fans' World Cup stories. © 2009 Human Kinetics, inc

Managing Corporate Reputation in the Blogosphere: The Case of Dell Computer

none4The emergence of the blogosphere has created new challenges for large companies in the management of their corporate reputations, since grass roots blogs can generate negative perceptions about a firm and then spread them rapidly and widely. The blogosphere has also created new opportunities for firms to enhance their reputations, because the informal and personal communication that occurs on blogs may generate significant positive ‘ Internet word of mouth ’ . This paper examines the interaction between the blogosphere and a leading technology company, Dell Computer, over a critical two-year period. Our approach combines two novel techniques: automated mining of blog entries, enabled by parsing software, which generates semantic analysis and network maps of the relevant blog entries; and netnography, a method derived from ethnography for analyzing Internet-based discussions. This study shows that many established reputation management approaches, which were developed during the era of mass media, need to be reshaped to meet new realities in the age of Web 2.0.Pasquale Del Vecchio; Robert Laubacher; Valentina Ndou; Giuseppina PassianteDEL VECCHIO, Pasquale; Robert, Laubacher; Ndou, Valentina; Passiante, Giuseppin

Whither Blogestan: Evaluating Shifts in Persian Cyberspace

Between 2002 and 2010, the Persian blogosphere—or what is referred to as “Blogestan”—exploded in size and became the topic of numerous reports, essays, videos and books. Global interest in this emerging trend, however, seemed to decrease during the second presidential mandate of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2009- 2013), when online social networking and microblogging became the most discussed and researched IT-related topics, along with the Iranian regime’s policies aimed at deterring online expression. This report is aimed at addressing whether Blogestan itself has faded in size, activity and influence since 2009. We use three parallel methodologies: An audience survey of 165 Persian blog users from inside and outside of Iran; a web crawling analysis of the Iranian blogosphere; and a series of interviews with 20 influential bloggers living outside and inside Iran