Search the Site

Posts Tagged ‘Blogs’

Which Way Does Your Blog Lean?

A new paper by Aaron Shaw and Yochai Benkler looks the differences between left- and right-wing political blogs during the summer of 2008.  From the abstract:

An examination of the top 155 political blogs reveals significant cross-ideological variations along several dimensions. Notably, the authors find evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation. Blogs on the left adopt different, and more participatory, technical platforms, comprise significantly fewer sole-authored sites, include user blogs, maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content, include longer narrative and discussion posts, and (among the top half of the blogs in the sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization.


New Blog Explores Economics of Digital World: Digitopoly

Our friend Joshua Gans, along with some colleagues, has launched a new blog devoted to the economics of digitization called digitopoly.org. Here, in a guest post, he explains the origins of the site, and what it’s all about.
 
Digonomics
By Joshua Gans
Some of the most popular blogs are tech blogs (Gizmodo, Engadget, TechCrunch) or blogs that place a tech perspective on social commentary (e.g., BoingBoing). And, as we know, economics blogs also tend to be popular. What was missing though was a blog devoted to the economics and competitive issues that arise in the digital age. What’s more, thanks to the NBER’s new Program on the Economics of Digitization (funded by the Sloan Foundation), there is a wealth of new research in this area. That’s how we came to setup a blog devoted to digital issues from an economics perspective.


The Economics of Economics Blogs

Last week, the World Bank blog Development Impact wrote about the influence of economics blogs on downloads of research papers. It included Freakonomics.com, as well as 5 other blogs — Aid Watch, Chris Blattman, NYT’s Economix, Marginal Revolution, and Paul Krugman. Using stats from Research Papers in Economics, it found spikes after blogs cover a paper. For us, it found a 450-470 increase in abstract views and downloads. Check out their cool graph:


Tim Harford spills his guts

Patri Friedman, who is among other things a high-stakes poker player and a relative of Milton Friedman (I think), has an interesting interview with Tim Harford at the blog catallarchy. Patri’s webpage is pretty amusing as well.


Held Hostage by our Blog

While it is true that Dubner and I sometimes feel that we are held hostage by our blog (in the sense that the constant need to provide new content weighs on us), it has never been our intention to hold reader comments hostage. We had no idea that if a reader comment contained one of hundreds of suspect words (automatically . . .


A bargain at $900,000

I have no idea what this means, but now a bunch of kind readers have sent me a link to the following website which purports to tell you what your blog is worth. The answer for the Freakonomics Blog, at least when I looked, was $996,413.10. Hmmm. That seems just a bit high. I talked to Dubner and we agreed . . .


Is Blogging Dangerous for Your Academic Health?

Maybe, maybe not. But here’s the story of how Daniel Drezner, an assistant professor in political science at the University of Chicago (and an active blogger) was just denied tenure.