Off-topic segue from yesterday's post...

"Findings reflect a pattern traced with 'off-topic' segues and emotionally-charged or controversial 'descriptors' flagged or defined as tags, headlines, blog intros, selected links and/or frame of reference."

I came across that juicy little sentence in a media report recently shared with me. Whether or not its author knew what he was talking about, I suspect that he was ultimately fortunate in that his intended reader was unlikely to have been a native-born English speaker.

Having concluded a couple of chapters of that Internet research book I mentioned yesterday, I now realise that there's a whole argot of impressive-sounding terms in the academic field of CMC (Computer-mediated Communications) that I have been missing out on.

These include multiplexes, symbolic interactionism, adaptive structuration, sociograms, solidarities, dyads, egos and alters, coalitions and − intriguingly − cleavages.

I guess I would have to admit though, that many of the central questions that Social Network analysts ask when studying the relational patterns of mediated interaction are also relevant to the study of connections within the blogosphere:

• What is the directionality of the relationship?
• To what extent is it transitive?
• To what extent is it part of a multiplex of ties within a broader electronic/face-to face relationship?
• What is the range and density of the network in question and which are the central egos within it?

The problem remains that groups linking people and people linking groups form and un-form at a far more accelerated pace in the blogosphere, with a window of commercial relevance that may preclude the formal statistical research espoused by the academic authors of these chapters. And Hyperlinks are always rather hyper-thetical until something more human than spider-like actually follows them.

In one of his more lucid moments the author of the report cited above referred to an interesting metric called "positive clutter", a measure of how much positive (or indeed irrelevant) content is returned by queries ostensibly designed to seek out the prominent negative voices. Clutter, positive or otherwise, is not something I'd expect my blog search engines to measure on the fly for me. However, doing a little bit of research yesterday it occurred to me that it would be handy to be able to immediately click on a blog search page to drill down to:

• The individual blogs with the most mentions of a particular keyword or phrase
• The blogs or post permalinks with the most links with a set returned by a specific query.