gift economies
I'm putting together, slowly, the list of possible blogs I'll use as a subject pool. My slow, intermittent work for the last several days has yielded a list with nearly 2000 blogs (this includes duplicates), and that's only the blogrolls from ONE PERSON's (David Weinberger) weblog. I'm not even half way though his blogroll yet, either.
The method for compiling and then selecting blogs for the project goes thusly (and was a gift from Collin): I began at Technorati's 100 most popular blogs. I worked my way down the list until I found the (at the time) highest ranking blog with a blogroll--most of those blogs listed on the Technorati top 100 do not publish/offer blogrolls. That highest ranking blog was Joho. I then began to follow the links to each of the sites on his blogroll, and copy/pasted their blogroll from that site into a Word doc.
I will continue to do this--for how long, I'm not sure--and when I have generated a list long enough (again, what's that look like? I don't know yet), I'll alphabetize the list and choose from those blogs that are the "most connected." Right now I've got B working on helping me (another gift) by importing the list into both Excel and Minitab, which count duplicates and does statistics stuff. We're just futzing with it now--I don't plan to be done with this step for another week or more.
I'm hoping that this will be a rigorous enough method for limiting the pool and for selecting the most "connected" writers. I've got a few concerns, though. The first is that right now, most of who is coming up--understandably so, considering that I started with Joho--are bloggers who are blogging ABOUT networks, connectivity, social software, social structures, etc. It seems like if I end up with a subject pool who take up the very discussion I'm working to engage, things will all get a little too "meta" for me. That is, it might be too difficult to orchestrate my discussion as separate from theirs. (?)
To remedy this, I'll probably construct at least one more potential subject pool that begins from a different blogger--one who is decidedly not part of the extended Joho network.
But I feel like I'm up against problems with this. This process seems a bit scattershot. I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to begin from a "pure" place--a blogroll on a blog that is more certainly a central node.
Ah. What I should do is conduct the first subject pool centrality survey, and then take the most-linked blog from that initial list as my starting point, and from there generate the list from which I'll select the blogs for the network/rhetorical analysis...
Except really, that is what Technorati did for me in the first place. So. *sigh*.
I just feel like I need to be using a method or formula that is extensive and clinical-sounding, like eigenvector centrality. Of course, I go cross-eyed trying to understand all the "if this...let such-and-so be this..." But I'm pretty sure if I found someone who did understand all those lambdas to help me (that would, of course be another gift), I could make it work.
Next: the real reason I titled this entry "gift economies." It wasn't originally going to be about all the help I'm getting on this diss. But the post is too far gone at this point to try to recover my original purpose; I'll blog that tomorrow.