Singapore.
We're moving rapidly towards the conclusion of this ICA 2010 conference. The next session I'm attending starts with a paper by Carol Soon, whose interest is in activist bloggers. She notes the rise of net-activisim and transnational social movements. While the genesis of blogging lies in personal gratification, blogs also have a transformative power and can lead to greater civic engagement, by disseminating information and facilitating information exchange.

Previous studies have examined both bloggers' uses and gratifications as well as the hyperlinking and network structure of blogs and blogging; Carol's study adds to this by exploring the collective identity of Singapore activist bloggers and its role in engendering social action. Is there a tension betwen the individual and the collective?

Singapore.
The next ICA 2010 speakers are Deanna and Timothy Sellnow, whose focus is on the use of social media in crisis events - here, the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. Such events are cosmology episodes, where understanding is lost, and people ask where am I, what happened, and who can help me understand what happened. They need to rebuild understanding through the process of sensemaking - and this moment of cosmology must be dissected to reduce uncertainty. Social media - especially Facebook - had a prominent role in this.

Singapore.
Wahey - we're in the last day of ICA 2010, which starts with a session on Web 2.0. Chien-leng Hsu is the first presenter, focussing on social link networks especially on Twitter. There are suggestions that offline and online relationships may be co-constructed; in Korea, in particular, many politicians are also using online media to communicate with their constituencies. Others suggests that online media are a fragmenting influence - but Twitter is also seen as an important tool for information dissemination.

Singapore.
The final speaker in this ICA 2010 session is Hallvard Moe, whose focus is also on mapping the blogosphere. What is its structure, as part of the wider public sphere; where are the borders of its community, and how communal is it -how are its interlinkages distributed?

Studies of the public sphere and online media tend to focus on specific 'noteworthy' forms of public communication and deliberation, but we need a wider definition of public communication than just 'political debate'. Blogs can be organised along a continuum spanned by the three axes of content (from internal to topical), directional (from monological to dialogical) and style (from intimate to objective); public sphere research tends to focus mainly on one point in that continuum, and we need to move beyond this.

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki, who also notes the differences between different types of hyperlinks. Links on politicians' sites in Japan, for example, may connect to the politicians' constituencies, show their political affiliations, or facilitate the use of new media for supporter mobilisation. There is also a question of where links are located (on a separate links page or on the politicians' sites' front pages), of course, which points to their different level of impact.

Singapore.
The next speaker in this session at ICA 2010 is Se Jung Park, whose focus is on the use of the Korean social networking site Cyworld by politicians. South Korea is a leading country for Internet access, of course, but sites like Facebook and Twitter are not very popular; YouTube, in fact, is partially censored. So, Cyworld is the main space for social networking - including for politicians.

The present study examined the comments left on the Cyworld 'mini-hompys' of Korean politicians during April 2008 and June 2009; from the total number, some 200 comments from each politician's space were randomly selected, and a semantic sentiment analysis was then conducted. There were obvious spikes in commenting during the recent mass protests against the reintroduction of US beef imports.

Singapore.
The final speaker in this ICA 2010 session is James Danowski, who zooms in on online networking patterns across Arab countries especially. One suggestion here is that Internet network development is a precursor to the development of civil societies - and from 2004 to 2010 there's been a tenfold increase in the number of Internet hosts in Arab countries (with a doubling in the last two years alone). So has the lag between network and civil society development remained the same; is it different between English and Arabic spaces online; can we compare this to the development patterns in telephony networks? Can this be tracked through appearances of key Islamic terms like 'sharia' or 'jihad'?

Singapore.
The Friday at ICA 2010 starts with the first of two panels on online network mapping (I'll be presenting in the second one, later today). My brilliant PhD student Tim Highfield is the first presenter. His interest is in topical discussion networks in the French political blogosphere: such topical networks comprise sites commenting on specific events or issues, and the links between them. This observation comes out of a larger dataset collected over a longer period of time.

Singapore.
Finally we move on to Tom Bakker in his ICA 2010 session, who has undertaken a content analysis of political blogs by citizens. Tom notes that there are a variety of terms to describe this citizen journalism, and that political Weblogs still tend to be seen as an archetype for this field; hence the focus on Weblogs. Who are the people who start such blogs, and what are they doing? Is it really 'everybody', as Clay Shirky has said?

In the first place, though: how do we find them? Tom began by using five blog search engines (Google Blogsearch, Technorati, Blogpulse, Icerocket, and Truthlaidbear) to find active Dutch blogs authored by citizens; these were narrowed down to political blogs by examining how the blogger or blog described themselves, and by checking whether at least two of the last five posts dealt with political topics. For the Netherlands, this ultimately resulted in a list of some 163 blogs - so, hardly 'everybody', but actually a fairly small group.