Harvard case study on blogging

Monday, March 8, 2004 by Dave Winer.

Trent Lott and the bloggers 

A milestone case study from the Shorenstein Center was released on Friday last week. It tells the story of Senator Trent Lott, (R-MS); his talk at Strom Thurmond's birthday party in December 2002, and how the news flowed through professional channels, to the blogosphere, and back, ultimately resulting in Lott's resignation as majority leader of the US Senate.

Shorenstein Center is part of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

A personal note, it's gratifying to see the study is available publicly, this makes it available for review by bloggers, as well as being useful in classrooms, and as a reference to scholars who will study weblogs in the future.

We've created a place for comment on the Shorenstein study.

Dave Winer

Upcoming events 

Next week I'll be in the Bay Area attending the WIRED Rave Awards on Monday night. I'm nominated this year in the Software Designer category, along with the designers of Friendster, Skype, BitTorrent and iTunes. I was nominated for work with RSS. With any luck, we'll be able to announce Andrew Grumet's work that connects RSS with BitTorrent. We're very excited about combining syndication with Big Media Objects. It would be cool to make the announcement on the day of the award ceremony, March 15, in San Francisco.

Next month I'm hosting the second BloggerCon at Harvard Law School, on April 17. It's a one-day event, four tracks each with four 1.5 hour discussions. The cost to attend is $0. The timing of this BloggerCon is at a turning point in the US political process. The first conference was held in October 2003, when the new excitement about the use of the Internet in the Presidential campaign was front and center. Now it's time, between the primaries and the conventions, to take stock, in time to apply what we've learned in the subsequent stages of the election.

Dave Winer