Boston.
In addition to the various vodcast-based means of staying up to date with political developments [4] in Australia and the world even while in the sadly news-starved U.S., I'm also a regular reader of Larvatus Prodeo [5] at the moment - one of the most consistently insightful Australian political group blogs. (The Prodeans are having a great deal [6] of fun [7] at the expense of the Canberra press gallery punditariat at the moment - very enjoyable.)

So, in that context it's very timely that my article on mapping the Australian political blogosphere using the IssueCrawler research tool has just been published in First Monday [8]. This analyses my David Hicks case study, some of the outcomes of which I've published here in the past [9], with a particular view to outlining possible methodological opportunities combining IssueCrawler [10] and Technorati [11]. I'm very grateful to Edward Valauskas and the First Monday team for turning the article around so quickly - beats print journals any time...

This article is something of a stepping stone to the chapter on the Australian political blogosphere which Debra Adams and I have proposed for the Accented Blogging [12] collection (and which we're currently writing). There are plenty more opportunities for applying network research using IssueCrawler and similar tools to the study of blogs, of course - I'm also interested in exploring the use of additional technologies such as Yahoo! Pipes [13] (as a means of pre-filtering the crawl seeds, for example) and IBM's exciting Many Eyes visualisation tools [14], which Josh Green [15] put me on to the other day (for further interactive visualisation of the crawl results). If anyone else is working in this area, I'd love to hear from you...

Technorati : Australia [16], First Monday [17], IssueCrawler [18], Larvatus Prodeo [19], blogs [20], politics [21], research [22]
Del.icio.us : Australia [23], First Monday [24], IssueCrawler [25], Larvatus Prodeo [26], blogs [27], politics [28], research [29]