Our paper, Fifteen Minutes of Fame: The Place of Blogs in the Life Cycle of Viral Political Information addresses the dynamics of viral information in the blogosphere, and is interested in empirically understanding how blogs play a role in the virality process. More specifically, we developed a new methodology that creates a map of the ‘life cycle’ of blogs posting links to viral information. Our dataset focused on the linking practices of blogs to the most significant viral videos of the 2008 US presidential election. To do so, we gathered data on all blogs (n=9,765) and their posts (n=13,173) linking to 65 of the top US presidential election videos that became viral on the Internet during the period between March 2007 and June 2009. Among other things, our findings illuminated the importance of different types of blogs: elite, top-political, top-general and tail blogs. We also found that while elite and top-general blogs create political information, they drive and sustain the viral process, whereas top-political and tail blogs act as followers in the process. [I will probably write a separated post about our paper].

Below are the papers that will be presented in that conference:

In a web 2.0 world the relationship of gatekeepers-gated is intriguing. The users ability to produce information and the dynamic relationship between users and gatekeepers makes NGT (Network Gatekeeping Theory) a great framework to analyze these chages.

An elaborated article about Network Gatekeeping Theory can be found here: Barzilai-Nahon Karine, 2008, “Toward a Theory of Network Gatekeeping: A Framework for Exploring Information Control“, Journal of the American Information Science and Technology, Vol. 59(9), pp. 1-20.

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