Dan's Metablog: Blogging and Narrative: Sociology of the Technorati 100

Sociology of the Technorati 100 Sunday, January 22 3:08 AM

(X-posted to Dan's Webpage)

So I finished my sociology essay. Granted, it took about a month longer than I wanted it to but... well, now I'm done, and with the possible exception of my "blogs can be camp" essay, I'm reasonably proud of my work.

My main essay was an attempt to correlate the geographic distribution of the Technorati 100 (as of November 25, 2005 — the list is surprisingly fluid) with the rankings used in the Metropolitan New Economy Index, some diversity and tolerance indices devised by Florida and Gates (pdf), and basic variables like education and population.

Here are the three main pieces of this project:

Demography of the Technorati 100 essay.

Data collected on Technorati 100 bloggers. I expect there are one or two mistakes in the data here, from outdated articles or posts, but there was little to no guesswork.

Data collected on cities. How many Technorati 100 blogs they have, index ratings, etc. New York is easily the nation's blog capital, Chicago is the most under-represented city.

Speaking of all-consuming projects, I can't wait to plunge back into my research project. Next week is all about wooing a possible advisor.

Granted, it would be nice to know what the other half of my corpus is going to be (I'm studying the "best writing of a weblog" bloggers, more on that later I'm sure), but apparently the Bloggies guy couldn't manage to do 150 screen captures (or is it only 30?) over the course of four days. That's his excuse, anyways.

The finalists list is two days late at this point and I'm left checking the site compusively. I suppose I can always catch up on four days worth of news instead.

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