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I noticed this in my logs the other day:
140.247.115.206 - - [01/Feb/2007:02:05:38 -0500] “GET /?feed=rss2 HTTP/1.1″ 200 10107 “-” “Blog Conversation Project; blogs@iq.harvard.edu; http://gking.harvard.edu/blogconv/”
The Blog Conversation Project
is a research study developing methods of automatically reading and coding all blogs on specific topics so that we can measure the views expressed in this national or international conversation. We have developed methods that make possible automated public opinion polls of those with opinions, coded directly from the blogs. This may be more informative about some issues than the usual stategy of polling randomly selected citizens, many of whom have not thought about the question they are being asked. This project might also help us understand better the process of agenda-setting, the expressed thoughts of activists and those who have thought about issues, public views about commercial products, or any other subject of interest.
To be fair, one may be excluded from the monitoring:
Our main interest is developing aggregate summaries across millions of blogs, rather than providing information about any individual blogger: We are studying the conversation, not any individual participant in that conversation. Since we wish to hear only those who wish to be heard, any blogger who prefers to be excluded from our automated analyses (and from our reports on the national conversation) can use standard web protocols to exclude robots, which we follow.
