For students who are interested in working on Media Cloud through Google Summer of Code, we have put together a list of possible Media Cloud projects here. There is also a Berkman Wiki listing Berkman specific GSoC requirements as well a number of other interesting Berkman projects also participating in GSoC. Finally, the GSoC homepage contains detailed information about GSoC policies and eligibility requirements.

The final application deadline is April 6 at 19:00 UTC but early applications are preferred.

Week of June 20 – June 26 (Red) Compared to June 13 – June 19 (Blue) for Five Major Russian Media Segments (TV, Pop Blogs, Random Blogs, Mainstream Media, Government):

New issues related to domestic politics and finance seem to dominate the overall week-to-week comparison cloud, indicated by the emergence of new high frequency words (in red) such as “банк” (bank), “бюджет” (budget), “газа” (gas), and “национальной” (national).  The frequent discussion of banks this week is in part accounted for by the catastrophic failure and subsequent bailout of the Bank of Moscow, Russia’s fifth largest bank.  In what is reputed to be “the largest bailout in modern Russian history,” the bank will receive as much as $14 billion in state-backed loans, with the state-run VTB Bank increasing its stake in the company to 75%.

The Russian budget and budgetary constraints were also an important theme in this week’s news.  On Wednesday, 6/29, President Dmitry Medvedev delivered an address to the Duma laying out his three year budget guidelines for the 2012-2014 period.  Focusing on governance efficiency, modernization, competitiveness, long term development, and living standards, the President laid out 12 vital areas of budget policy that will be central to achieving national economic goals in the coming years.  In addition to his ongoing emphasis on modernization, Medvedev stressed the need for economic decentralization, with development occurring on a regional level and not just in and around the capital cities.  Budgets were also discussed in several other contexts this week, helping to account for the appearance of “бюджет” in the week’s overall word cloud.  Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made headlines for drawing attention to the need to ensure the new budget would be deficit-free.  New stories also discussed the protests in Greece related to that country’s budget debate and the possible implications for Russian oil revenue.  Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported on a new study that shows Russians on average spend 30% of their household budget on food, with poorer families spending as much as 50% of their income.  The discussion of Medvedev’s budgetary plan and related topics clearly dominated the Government media segment for the week.  New high frequency words there such as “развивать,” (develop), “реализации” (implementation), “региональных” (regional), “современные” (modern), “экономики” (economy), “экономической” (economic), and “технического” (technical) indicate the frequent discussion of some of the main components of Medvedev’s plan.

Week of June 27 – July 3 (Red) Compared to June 20 – June 26 (Blue) for Russian Government:

A couple of last week’s major stories continued to attract attention this week, with related terms showing up in purple in the week-to-week comparison cloud.  These include, for example, the nomination of St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matvienko to become Speaker of the Federation Council.  With the approval of Medvedev and Putin, this week Matvienko agreed to accept the new position.  Opposition formed in Saint Petersburg, with young Yabloko party members protesting in the street on Wednesday and the formation of an opposition bloc entitled “St. Petersburg against Matvienko.”  As the city’s governor since 2003, Matvienko had become increasingly unpopular.  Resented by local residents for her government’s failure to clear the streets of snow and ice in the winter, many have speculated that Matvienko’s move was part of an effort to buoy support for the United Russia party in preparation for the upcoming Duma elections this December.  This story’s continued prominence is indicated by the frequency of words such as “петербург” (Petersburg), “федерации” ([of the] federation), and “совет” (council) in the week’s overall cloud.  Drilling down into specific media segments, the attention garnered by Matvienko’s high profile move becomes even more apparent, with her name (“Матвиенко”) and the word “губернатор” (governor) appearing among the new high frequency words in this week’s Mainstream Media word cloud.

Week of June 27 – July 3 (Red) Compared to June 20 – June 26 (Blue) for Russian Mainstream Media:

Some additional prominent topics in the week’s news also become more apparent on examining some of the other week-to-week comparisons for particular media segments.  The ongoing controversy surrounding the corruption accusations against and trial of former Orange Revolution leader Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine, for example, attracted the attention of some news segments more than others.  The former prime minister was indicted last December for abuse of power, with President Victor Yanukovich claiming that she illegally used $425 million in “Kyoto money” (money received from the sale of of carbon emission quotas) to finance pensions.  If she is found guilty, Tymoshenko will be banned from holding political office.  While some variant on “Украина” (Ukraine) appears as a high frequency word over the last couple of weeks in the Mainstream Media and the Popular Blogs word clouds, this topic appears not to have received equal attention in all media segments.  A comparison between popular blogs and TV media shows that this story appears to have gotten significantly more attention in the blogosphere than in television news coverage – demonstrated by the appearance of “Украины” in red in the word cloud comparing these two media segments.

Russian Popular Blogs (Red) versus Television (Blue) for Week of June 27 – July 3:

A similar contrast can be seen in the coverage of ongoing conflict between Russia and Belarus over unpaid electricity debt for April and May.  Belarus, which has been suffering a deep economic crisis over the last several months owes Russia some 1.2 billion rubles ($43 million) – a situation which came to a crisis this week, with the Kremlin threatening to cut off Belorussian electricity supplies if this debt was not repaid by Wednesday.  Though the immediate crisis was resolved by week’s end with Belarus promising to pay its debt and Russia restoring power supplies, the tension between the two countries continued, with disagreement as to the extent to which natural gas prices should be reduced in light of the recent Belarusian currency devaluation.  This story, as with that concerning Ukraine, appears to have received more attention in some media segments than others.  In contrast to the Ukrainian trial, this story seems to have been covered more by television and mainstream media and received less scrutiny in the blogosphere.  Note the appearance of “Белоруссия” (Belarus) in blue in the word cloud comparing high frequency words in the week’s TV and Popular Blog media segments.

Week of June 20 – June 26 (Red) Compared to June 13 – June 19 (Blue) for Five Major Russian Media Segments (TV, Pop Blogs, Random Blogs, Mainstream Media, Government):

As is clear from this week’s overall comparative word cloud across five major media segments, one of the dominant themes in the week’s media has been the 70^th anniversary of the German invasion of Russia that marked the beginning of the Great Patriotic War (World War II).  The German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) began on June 22^nd 1941 when Nazi tanks entered Soviet territory near the town of Brest in Belarus.  It was the beginning of four years of war in which over 20 million Soviet soldiers and civilians would perish (over 13% of the population).  The anniversary, referred to as a national “Day of Memory and Sorrow,” was somberly recalled in memorial events across Russia this week.  The unusually high occurrence of various forms of words such as “война” (war), “служба” (service), “великий” (great [patriotic war]), and “военный” (military) indicates the frequency with which the war and its legacy were discussed across the five media segments over the course of this week.  Some variants of one or more of these words appear clearly in the week’s word clouds for both Mainstream Media and Television, indicating that the story had particular prominence across these segments.  In popular blogs, we also see higher than usual discussion involving words such as “советский” (Soviet), often involving discussion of Soviet history and the legacy of the war.

One of the other major stories of the week was the June 20^th crash of a passenger airplane (a Tupolev 134A-3) en route from Moscow to Petrozavodsk.  Flight RA-65691 of the airline RusAir (Русэйр) crashed and broke apart on landing, killing forty-seven out of fifty-two occupants.  This story is clearly indicated by prominent words in the week’s word cloud, such as “самолет” (airplane) and “петрозаводск” (Petrozavodsk).  One or both of these words appear in the week’s word clouds for both the Mainstream Media and TV.  The story apparently also received some prominent attention in the Government press, with “мчс” (acronym for the Russian Emergencies Ministry) appearing as one of the week’s highest frequency words for that news segment.  This theme seems to have been particularly picked up in Russian television, with additional words such as “авиакатастрофе” (aviation accident), “больницы” (hospitals), “погибших” (dead/deceased), “аэропорт” (airport), “пассажир” (passenger), “транспорт” (transportation), and “транспортакатастрофы” (transportation accident) featuring as unusually high frequency words visible in the segment-specific weekly word clouds.

A third significant set of stories of this week had to do with the appointments and nominations of officials for government positions.  Specifically, this included President Medvedev’s appointment of officials to fill leadership positions in the Ministry of the Interior (Министерство Внутренних дел Российской Федерации), the President’s apparent support for Saint Petersburg Governor Valentina Matvienko’s nomination as the new Speaker of Russia’s Federation Council (Совет Федерации), and the reappointment of Yuri Chaika as Prosecutor General (Генеральный Прокурор) by the Federation Council.  These stories are indicated by the prevalence of words such as “министерства” (ministry), “внутренних” (internal), “совет” (council), “федерации” ([of the] federation), and “генерал” (general).  The coverage of these news events appears to have been particularly strong, not surprisingly, across the Government media segment, though they also have received some attention in TV, Mainstream Media, and Popular Blogs.

Below are the week’s comparative word clouds from each of the five media segments (TV, mainstream media, government, popular blogs, and a random sample of all blogs).  Click on these figures to view interactive word clouds from which to explore themes of interest.

Week of June 20 – June 26 (Red) Compared to June 13 – June 19 (Blue) for Russian TV:

Week of June 20 – June 26 (Red) Compared to June 13 – June 19 (Blue) for Russian Mainstream Media:

Week of June 20 – June 26 (Red) Compared to June 13 – June 19 (Blue) for Russian Government:

Week of June 20 – June 26 (Red) Compared to June 13 – June 19 (Blue) for Russian Popular Blogs:

Week of June 20 – June 26 (Red) Compared to June 13 – June 19 (Blue) for Russian Random  Blogs:

Words in four prominent media segments (popular blogs, mainstream media, government, television) during the week starting 2011-06-05 (Blue) versus during the week starting 2011-06-12 (Red):

The word cloud above, comparing a combined set of main media sources from June 12^th through June 18^th 2011 (red) with the same set of sources over the previous week, June 5^th through June 11^th 2011 (blue), shows several new stories emerging (blue), but none of these are at as high a word frequency as the major words in purple (mentioned frequently both weeks) or even as the major words from the previous week (in red).  The cloud compares the combined sets of popular blogs, mainstream media sources, government media content, and television media content across the two weeks.

Some of the newly prominent words do not appear to represent any major new stories –ubiquitous names and financial terms likely appear as top words only because of a relative decline in other major stories with more uncommon terms.

The overall cosine similarity across the four media segments in Media Cloud between the week of June 05-11 and June 12-18 is 0.905, demonstrating a fairly high level of similarity between the two weeks.  This level of variation is not constant across all media forms, however.  We see some dissimilarities in the patterns of change within distinct media sources.

Government sources here seem to have shown the most significant changes in topical foci between the two weeks, with TV and mainstream media showing the second greatest amounts of change, both showing lower cosine similarity scores than that between popular blogs during this period.  This is interesting, as it indicates that the blogosphere’s topical foci have remained relatively constant while some new topics have been introduced to (or have disappeared from) the mainstream media, TV, and government sources.

In terms of coverage of key stories, it appears that there is substantial difference between the topics receiving greatest attention across the different media segments.  Most of this variation has been consistent over the last week and does not mark a dramatic shift because of the variation in coverage of a suddenly emerging pivotal story.

As we can see here, there has in fact been a modest convergence in the similarity of different news sources in the last week.  That notwithstanding, however, the differences across segments are striking.  The following word cloud shows the comparison between the content of popular blogs versus government media outlets during the June 12^th-18^th period.

Words in Popular Blogs (Blue) during the week starting 2011-06-12 versus words in Government media sources (Red) during the same week:

Here we see that coverage of war, other countries (including the US and Ukraine), Moscow, words related to the internet, politics, and the Budanov murder (colonel, Budanov, murder) all receive more attention in the popular blogs, whereas words related to economics (budget, financial), governance (regional, municipal, federal, law), citizenship (self-governance, participation, citizen) feature prominently in the government media sources.

The extremely low cosine similarity value between popular blogs and government sources is consistent with tendencies noted in previous blog posts.  Perhaps more surprising is the fact that TV media sources appear even more dissimilar from government sources, with these two media segments showing the lowest cosine similarity for the week at 0.318.

Words in TV (Blue) during the week starting 2011-06-12 versus words in Government media sources (Red) during the same week:

Here the high frequency words from TV (blue) show significant difference from those appearing frequently in government sources (red) with very little overlap (purple) in high frequency words.  While this does not definitively indicate a lack of similarity in coverage (or lack of coverage) of some topics, it certainly appears to indicate that there is a fair degree of dissimilarity in the topics that are covered.  In addition to the TV coverage of the Budanov murder (which did not receive frequent mention in government sources), the TV sources for the week included more prominent discussion of Khodorkovsky, war, other countries (including Europe), and cultural items such as film and festivals.

As these last couple examples indicate, some of this dissimilarity here could have to do with non-news content in the TV news feed (or at least a broader definition of news to include things not addressed by government media sources); but, as demonstrated by the other examples of non-overlapping frequent words, it appears there also is some substantial difference in the primary news content.

Since most MSM sources have dedicated sports sections, we tend to see this sort of coverage when there isn’t a dominant story commanding attention.  Combine that with a holiday weekend and there’s not too much going on in the word clouds this week.  The blogosphere seems to be focused more on domestic politics this week, with mentions of the GOP presidential primary campaign, though Sarah Palin is the only potential candidate who gets any significant mentions–and she’s not even formally in the race.  That probably has something to do with her very mysterious bus tour of the East Coast, and the announcement of her planned movie.

When we compare the left and right blogospheres for this week, we find Palin gets heavy coverage in both (she was mostly to be found in the left blogosphere last week).  Anthony Weiner also merits attention from the right for his curious lewd Twitter picture incident.

For its part, the left has begun to make the backlash against Paul Ryan’s budget plan–and specifically his proposals to cut Medicare–a high-profile issue.  And for some inexplicable reason, right-wing political blogs have latched on to the Casey Anthony trial.  With the beginning of summer upon us, we’ll continue to watch whether soft news stories like the Casey Anthony trial pick up steam or if the onset of GOP campaign season will lead to more policy news.

What are the differences in how various Russian media outlets – traditional and web native – cover events?  How does coverage differ between sources during the same time period? Does coverage overlap – or do different outlets highlight different events?  What do these choices tell us about media outlet priorities and preferences?

With these questions in mind, we used Russian Media Cloud to determine the levels of similarity between four Russian media sets – Russian government websites, Russian television news, Russian mainstream media websites and popular Russian blogs -  over two weeks in April 2011.  We use cosine similarity to determine how similar the content of the media sets are to one another, a method described in this earlier post by Ethan Zuckerman.

Comparing the four media sets lead to six possible pairings – TV vs. MSM, MSM vs. Popular Blogs, TV vs. Popular Blogs, MSM vs. Government, TV vs. Government and Government vs. Popular Blogs. In the table below, we have listed these six pairings by similarity scores from most similar to least similar over the two weeks (where 1 would equal perfect similarity between two media sets, and 0 would equal perfect dissimilarity).

We selected the weeks of April 4^th and April 18^th in particular because of a difference in breadth of coverage – the word clouds on April 4^th had relatively high similarity scores whereas on April 18^th, the scores were comparatively low.   We were curious to see what this distinction in similarity scores between sources would tell us about the sources themselves, and the events they chose to cover.

Our hypothesis was that during one time period a set of major news stories may dominate all the media outlets, where as at other times, there are particular stories that are of interest to a specific media set.

A closer examination of the word clouds from each media set provides insight into which events and angles were featured by which type of source. Below, we have listed word clouds for each of the four media sets (TV, MSM, Popular Blogs and Government) during each of the two weeks studied.  We’ve provided English translations of leading key words.  Note that we are still refining the stoplist, extractor and parsor, so that unusual text may occasionally appear.

As Bruce Etling qualified in an earlier post – “Media Cloud outputs alone do not say anything about the meaning behind the differences between different sources.  However, with additional context about what we know of the political situation and media ownership in Russia, as well qualitative analysis of sentences within queries, we can begin to hypothesize about the possible meaning behind similarity scores, word clouds, polar maps and other automated outputs.”

In this case, our findings support our initial theory that similarity scores are higher when there is a prominent news story or event, and lower when no one set of news events dominates the agenda.  Specifically, on April 4^th, all media sets focused on four key stories, while on April 18^th, the sources each highlighted separate, more minor, stories.      In addition, this initial experiment found that despite the distinction in events, coverage or similarity ratios between weeks, the media outlets themselves appear to exhibit a specific pattern of preferences in terms of stories, news agenda and style.

During the two weeks studied, we found that television news, for example, was drawn to coverage of patriotic items and pageantry – such as celebrations of the 50^th anniversary of Russia (and the world’s) first human space flight, and the church ceremonies surrounding the Easter holidays.   During the same time period, the online mainstream media provided news of leading international current events such as those occurring in Japan or Libya, as well as more domestically focused tragedies and scandals, such as bombings in Minsk, or prominent kidnappings in Russia. Russian government sites are mostly focused on official discussions of protocol, procedures and regulations.  And finally, leading Russian blogs were generally full of discussions of personal and lifestyle topics, as well as personal perspectives on major national events such as holidays. The blogosphere is also a source of topics and discussions that were not featured elsewhere – such as discussions of the DDOS attacks on LiveJournal, and various debates surrounding the rights and statuses of minority ethnic groups.

April 4, 2011
This week, the similarity scores of all four key media sets were relatively high, indicating a high level of cosine similarity.  This could be attributed to the fact that four key stories dominated the Russian media this week, although each set of sources covered a different specific set:

The distribution of these stories within Russia’s media landscape is unsurprising.   For instance, a “patriotic” item such as the upcoming anniversary of the first human/ Russian in space and the Russian space program in general, was covered by both the Russian government sites as well as Russian television.  This was the only “current event” prominently featured on the government websites.  MSM and the blogosphere were less interested in the topic – but maybe because their coverage is more current, and the actual anniversary was not until April 12.

Prominent international current events surrounding Libya, Gadaffi, and Japan occupied both Russian television and the MSM.  Russian TV also discussed on the Fukushima reactor, although MSM did not.

On the blogosphere, personal and lifestyle topics related to children and family were more common. In terms of “current events” the blogosphere was mostly occupied with the DDOS attack on LiveJournal – a story that did not appear in any of the other outlets – neither the MSM, nor Television nor Government sites.

APRIL 18, 2011
This week, the similarity scores among the four key media sets were comparatively low, indicating a low level of cosine similarity.  The two most similar media outlets this week are still farther apart than least similar from the week of April 4th.    While one term/event – Easter – was appeared in all the word clouds, it was accompanied by different words for each media set.  In addition, there were at least six other topics that were featured in some media sets and not others.

The upcoming Easter celebrations were covered by all four sources, although each one addressed the topic from different angles and using different language.   Television in particular was dominated by coverage of official Easter celebrations and related pageantry, to the detriment of other news or current events.

The blogosphere was also caught up in discussions of the Easter holiday – although from a more personal perspective.   In addition, bloggers discussed two separate events involving the term “Caucuses,” which cause the word to appear in the cloud – ethno-nationalist protests against people from the Caucasus and a recent law exempting Caucasus residents from Russian military service.  These topics were not covered by either Television or MSM – at least not to a significant enough degree to allow the term to appear in the cloud.

The Mainstream Media did mention the Easter Holiday, but they were more focused on current events.  Three stories in particular were prominent on the MSM, but did not appear to receive significant coverage elsewhere.  These included the kidnapping (and subsequent release) of the son of  “Cyber security mogul” Kaspersky, the metro bombing in Minsk and the negotiations surrounding the Russian purchase of Mistral class helicopter carriers from France.

Russian government sites mentioned Easter, but were more focused on the newly organized Customs Union involving Russia, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus.

Conclusions
The process described above demonstrates approaches where comparing cosine similarity scores between media sets can be useful.  An examination of the similarity scores and word clouds during two highly divergent weeks indicates that sources may be more similar when a set of stories or events dominates the agenda, and more distinct when there is no one overwhelming set of events or perspectives.    It would be interesting to repeat this approach over future weeks to see if the initial theory continues to hold.

In addition, during the two weeks highlighted above, we found that each media set or media type appears to exhibit stylistic tendencies and news agenda preferences particular to its needs and audience.   Our preliminary results found Russian government sites to be mostly focused on official discussions of protocol, procedures and regulations, while television news highlighted patriotic events and pageantry. Online mainstream media covered leading international current events, as well as more domestically focused tragedies and scandals, while leading Russian blogs focused on personal and lifestyle topics, and also featured topics and discussions that did not appear elsewhere.

WORD CLOUDS

APRIL 4, 2011

1) MSM

April 4, MSM

Politics & Finance – Russia, Russian, Country, President, Moscow, Government, Regions, USA, Rubles, Banks, million, business, Military, Service, Dmitri, Medevedev, Vladimir, Segei, Alexander, Gadaffi, Libya, Japan

2) RUSSIAN TV

April 4, Russian TV

Politics – Russia, Russian, Country, President, Moscow, USA, Government, Region, International, Minister, Medvedev, Dmitri, Military, Service
Finance – Rubles, Market, Bank, Dollars
Misc – automobiles, cars, roads
Gagarin 50^th anniversary – Cosmos/Space, Program, Gagarin, Flight, Astronaut
Intl Current Events  – Gaddafi, Libya;  Japan, Fukushima

3. POP Blogs

April 4, Popular Blogs

General Politics/Finance – Russia, Russian, Country, Moscow, President, Wars, Government, Dollars, Rubles
Lifestyle - Film, Kids, Roads, Schools
Technology – File, Program, Users, Free (as in download), Site, Internet
Specific – Attacks, Live Journal

4. GOV

April 4, Government Blogs

Official  & Political – Federation, Federal, Government, Russia, Russian, President, Regions, Putin Medvedev, Mayor, International, Administration, safety, internal, military, general, ministry, service, organs (as in “of the government”), Rubles, Economics, workers, organizations, education, Cosmic/Space

April 18, 2011

1. RUSSIAN TV

April 18, Russian TV

Easter Holiday – Easter, Patriarch Cyrill, Church, Christ, Service, Saint, Holiday, believers, eggs
General Politics – Moscow, President, Moscow Mayor Sobyanin
Minsk bombing – explosion

2. MSM

April 18, MSM

Easter – Easter, Services
Minsk bombing – explosion, Lukashenko, killed, suffering
Kaspersky kidnapping – Kaspersky’s, son
Helicopter carrier negotiations – Mistral
Libya – Gaddaffi

3. Pop Blogs

April 18, Popular Blogs

Easter – Easter, holiday, Christ, rose (verb), egg, beliefs,
Politics/Events – economics, Russian, Caucaus
Technology – file, torrent, users, client, free, automatic, download

4. Gov

April 18, Government Blogs

Official – Government, Federation, Russian, administration
New Customs Union – customs, changes, border, ratification, protocol, points
Easter – Patriarch, Cyrill, Church

Click the image above for an interactive version of this map along with a list of clusters and which blogs belong to which clusters.

This map is generated by comparing the similarity of the top 100 words of each of the blogs in the popular blogs set during the first five months of 2011. Each dot represents a blog. We generate the cosine similarity of each blog to each other blog in the set and then designate the 3000 blog pairs with the highest similarity scores as being similar to one another. The map is then laid out using a force based mechanism, trying to push apart all of the nodes, with the 3000 similarity pairs acting as forces keeping those pairs together. So blogs that are similar to one another end up closer to one another in the map. The color of each node is the result of using the same cosine similarity scores to group the blogs into 25 separate clusters according to the similarity of the blogs’ content.

This map tells us that this U.S. popular blogs (to the degree they are represented by the particular Bloglines sample) can be grouped into three big meta clusters: Crafts, News, and Technology. Of these, the Craft meta-cluster is the biggest, and the biggest single cluster with 137 blogs is the big ‘love’ cluster (cluster labels are automatically generated as the most common word within the cluster’s member blogs). This is the most general cluster in the map, as indicated by the fact that it sits closest to the center of the map of any cluster. It is a mix of general crafting blogs and general personal life blogs. A few of the blogs include: [ Wee Wonderfuls ] [ Loobylu ] [ A Dress A Day ] [ Sea of Shoes ] [ PostSecret ] [ still me ] [ Loldogs, Dogs 'n' Puppy Dog Pictures - I Has A Hotdog! ] [ six and a half stitches ] [ CrazyAuntPurl ]. The word cloud for the ‘love’ cluster is strongly dominated by the title world, with mostly crafting words among the next most common:

The next largest cluster, with 44 blogs, within the crafting meta-cluster is the ‘knit’ cluster, which is exactly what it sounds like. According the clustering run, half as many blogs within the Bloglines top 1000 feeds focus on knitting as do on politics (82, which we’ll discuss below). A few of the blogs in this cluster are: [ Lolly Knitting Around ] [ SO MUCH YARN, SO LITTLE TIME! ] [ Grumperina goes to local yarn shops and Home Depot ] [ Twist Blog ] [ turkey feathers ] [ Hello Yarn ] [ Sheri at The Loopy Ewe ] [ Yarn-A-Go-Go ]. The word cloud for the cluster is exactly what one would expect a knitting word cloud to look like, with very strong focus on knitting and differentiation from other clusters:

Another prominent cluster within the crafting meta-cluster is the ‘recipe’ cluster, with 29 blogs. The blogs in this cluster include: [ (Inside A Black Apple) ] [ This American Life ] [ Baking Banter ] [ Cooking For Engineers ] [ Cheap Healthy Good - Frugal Recipes and Food Tips ] [ CRAFT ] [ smitten kitchen ] [ Accidental Hedonist ] [ not martha ]. The word cloud for this cluster consists almost entirely of directly food related words:

Almost all of the blogs and the top words in this cluster are on the topic of food. But the inclusion of This American Life, a radio show not focused at all on food, is a typical artifact of a content-based clustering process. In this particular case, This American Life posts a short summary of each show each week at its RSS feed. Two of the twelve weekly stories posted to its feeds for the time period of this clustering run are about the original recipe for coke and about the Onion, respectively. Because the rest of its stories are so diverse, those two stories, especially the recipe story, are enough to throw it into this recipe cluster.

The news meta-cluster is dominated by the ‘obama’ cluster of news sources. The ‘obama’ cluster has 82 feeds that are a a mix of general news, soft news, and political news in blogs and in mainstream blogs, including: [ Calculated Risk ] [ All Salon ] [ nybooks.com: Latest articles ] [ youtube :: most viewed videos - today ] [ Right Wing Nut House ] [ Overheard in New York ] [ NYT > Arts ] [ NYT > Opinion ] [ Yahoo! News: Top Stories ] [ Waiter Rant ]. This cluster has such a diversity of sorts of blogs because even this diversity of types of news gets swamped by the difference between any kind of news and the sorts of content in the crafting or technology meta-clusters. The word cloud for the ‘obama’ cluster shows that the content in the cluster is mostly dominated by politics, regardless of the diversity of the sources. In fact, the cloud acts as a pretty good description of political news coverage for the six months covered by the clustering run, with top words including not only the obvious ongoing ‘obama,’ ‘republican,’ and ‘democrat’ topics but also more specific topics dominating particular news cycles, like ‘egypt’, ‘libya,’ and ‘japan.’

The final meta-cluster is on technology, dominated by the ‘google,’ ‘app,’ and ‘iphone’ clusters. In this case, the k-means clustering that picks out cluster members (and assigns colors in the map) is able to subtly differentiate between these computer and Internet topics even though they are very closely related, even to close human inspection, but the mapping process (which assigns the position of the blogs on the map) is not able to differentiate among these blogs as well, leading to the dense clump of blogs on the right of the map.

The google cluster mostly consists of blogs that focus on topics directly related to google, including search engines (‘keyword’), search engine optimization (‘seo’), and online advertising (‘adsense’). The blogs in this cluster include: [ TEDTalks (video) ] [ Google Earth Blog ] [ Techdirt ] [ Coding Horror ] [ Google Sightseeing ] [ Daily Blog Tips ] [ Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing ] [ Adverblog ] [ Gmail Blog ]. There is potential for this cluster to contain some artifact members, since ‘google’ is such a common word on the Internet and is often used for meta-comment (eg. ‘use google to search this site…’). But in fact, every member of this cluster is actually substantively focused on Google or on the issues closely related to Google described in the cluster word cloud:

The app cluster is less strongly focused, including a variety of more generalist computer / technology related blogs: [ Hack a Day ] [ Random Acts Of Reality ] [ USATODAY.com Tech - Top Stories ] [ Download Squad ] [ Springwise ] [ Linux Journal - The Original Magazine of the Linux Community ] [ BBC News | Technology | UK Edition ] [ Scobleizer ] [ PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB drives ] [ Betanews ]. The cluster notably includes a wide variety of current platforms, including ‘android,’ ‘iphone’, ‘linux’, ‘mac’, and ‘microsoft’ (as well as ‘facebook,’ ‘google’, and ‘twitter’ arguably the dominant online platforms):

Finally, the iphone cluster includes blogs that focus on personal technology in general and iphones and ipads in particular: [ Pogue's Posts ] [ Going My Way ] [ ThinkGeek :: What's New ] [ AnandTech Article Channel ] [ MobileCrunch ] [ TechCrunch Japan ] [ Web Designer Wall - Design Trends and Tutorials ] [ Apple Hot News ] [ Cool Hunting ]. Even though the app cluster above includes desktop computing platforms (‘microsoft’ and ‘mac’), blogs about those platforms are only strongly represented in that general cluster. Blogs in the iphone cluster, in contrast, focus strongly on iphones and gadgets, creating a strongly separated cluster:

I’ll dig into more interesting details about this U.S. Popular Blog map in future posts. Please feel free to poke at the full results of the clustering run and add your observations below.

Mitch Daniels’ decision not to run for president and the rapture-that-never-was got a sizable chunk of the coverage this week, though the rapture is only trending in the blogosphere while Daniels’ decision not to run appears in both the blogosphere and the MSM.  While Daniels is the 22nd most frequent word in the MSM (with .45% of all mentions) and the 10th most frequent word in the blogosphere (with .95% of all words), the rapture is only 169th in the MSM (.19%) but 18th in the blogosphere (.67%).

In a somewhat surprising finding, the rapture seems to be most particularly popular in the left blogosphere:

President Obama’s policy speech about the Middle East was the biggest story of the week and, despite the majority of the speech being devoted to the Arab Spring, his mentions of Israel and Palestine got the most attention.  Interestingly, Israel trends in both the blogosphere and the MSM while “Palestinian” trends only in blogs.

Sarah Palin continues to receive prominent coverage in the blogosphere, despite the MSM having seemingly given up on her as a major story.  As we can see from the right vs. left blogs cloud above, she’s receiving coverage on both ends of the political spectrum.  Specifically, it seems Palin’s purchase of a home in Scottsdale, AZ got more coverage in left blogs than on the right.

The right vs. left blogs comparison from this week also shows that right blogs were more focused on the Obama Middle East speech–and its subsequent fallout–while left blogs concentrated on domestic politics.  “Medicare” is the 11th most popular term in the left blogosphere.  It may have something to do with coverage of the NY-26 special congressional election, where Democrat Kathy Hochul pulled off a surprise victory which has been attributed to unease over the GOP candidate’s support for Paul Ryan’s plan to cut Medicare.  Given what we’ve seen of right blogs’ coverage of domestic politics in the past, this may be a sign that the amount of coverage in either blogosphere is positively related to how “good” the news is for each side.

Last week, I postulated that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s admission that he fathered a child with a member of his household staff would be big news this week.  Alas, I was wrong.  And it also seems, when we look at last week’s coverage against this week’s, that the other big recent sex scandal has also fallen out of the headlines:

For those who lament the media’s over-coverage of sex scandals at the expense of substantive policy news, they can take comfort in this week’s findings.

“Huckabee” is the tenth most popular word in the MSM (with .79% of all words) but is first in the blogosphere with 2.4%.  If we dig deeper and see how the MSM and political blogosphere are covering Huckabee we’ll notice a lot of similarity in coverage (similarity score of .983), and nothing else too surprising:

Except that Sarah Palin seems to be the only viable GOP candidate that is not getting significant coverage in the MSM.  She’s showing up very high in the blogosphere when we pivot on “Huckabee” (4th most mentioned word, at 2.7% of the mentions) but is only 31st most mentioned in the MSM with .46% of the mentions.  By contrast, Michelle Bachmann is 23rd with .61% of the mentions.  Is this a sign that the MSM has given up on Sarah Palin?  It may be that the MSM has decided Sarah Palin isn’t going to run and are only giving significant coverage to viable candidates.  On the other hand, though her star may be fading, it seems Sarah Palin retains her popularity in the blogosphere.

When we examine coverage across the left and right blogosphere this week, we see some divergence:

The left’s heavy coverage of Israel/Palestine seems to be related to the agreement between Fatah and Hamas to form a unity government.  In contrast, the right is solidly focused on the GOP primary.

Despite hitting the news on the last day of the week, IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest for sexual assault at a New York City hotel made a splash in the word cloud this week.  In fact, “Strauss” is the most mentioned word in the MSM accounting for 1.1% of all words (“Kahn” is third with 1.07%).  In political blogs, “Kahn” lands in 10th position (“Strauss” in 11th) with .83% of the coverage. Together, he and Huckabee have managed to push Osama bin Laden down in coverage.  “Laden” was the runaway top story last week but is on the 16th most mentioned word in the MSM this week.  In the political blogosphere, “Laden” comes in 9th just ahead of Strauss-Kahn.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s disclosure of his own sexual exploits promises to grab a big chunk of the coverage next week.  We’ll be sure to look at how that compares to the Strauss-Kahn coverage and how it affects coverage of presidential politics.

It is no secret that the Arab Spring has shaken authoritarian governments not just in the Middle East, but around the world. China has engaged in a severe crackdown on dissent, including imprisoning well-known artist Ai Weiwei, and has also gone so far as to prohibit the sale of Jasmine. But what about Russia, which has left its Internet mostly open but is more similar to China in its repression of offline political action?

As I noted in my last post, the recent events in Egypt and Tunisia provide a great example of the appearance of an agenda item in the Russian blogosphere that is almost completely absent from official Russian government information channels. The Russian government, it seems, didn’t know what to say, or how to say it.

The polar map above shows the similarity of Russian popular blogs, Russian top 25 most popular media, Russian TV, and the Russian Government feeds that use the terms ‘Egypt,’ ‘Tunisia’ or ‘Protest’ from December 25, 2010 to February 21, 2011 (Mubarak officially stepped down on February 11). The center node on this map (black) is our list of Top 25 Russian mainstream or popular media. The further a given source is from this center node, the more dissimilar it is to the collective content of the mainstream media. (I would have preferred to use the government as the center node, but the lack of data from the government on this specific query made that impossible. So what we really are looking at in the above polar map is the comparison of mainstream media to blogs, and the absence of the Russian government.)

It is clear in the above polar map that there is a large difference between the terms used by the majority of popular blogs compared to more traditional Russian media when discussing Egypt and the protests. Most popular mainstream media and TV channels are found near the center of the map along with a handful of popular blogs. The majority of popular blogs are pushed even further to the edge of the chart, and with a more clearly delineated white space between mainstream media and the outer ring of blogs than in the examples in my previous Media Cloud post.

The content clusters (the color of a given node on the map and related cluster title) are also revealing. A selection of sentences from the different sources highlights how different the discussion actually is between blogs and other more traditional media. The mainstream media talk primarily about tourists. A quick reading of the first thousand sentences in this query that use the word tourists show that a clear majority of this discussion is indeed about Russian tourists trying to get out of Tunisia and Egypt, official government statements about the safety of tourists and the need to help them evacuate, and additional flights that were added to help Russian tourists return home. For example, this is a sentence from the mainstream media found in the tourist cluster:

Rosturizm [the Federal Agency for Tourism] is looking after the fate of the Russian tourists vacationing in Tunisia. A decision about the necessity of their return home, in the context of massive riots and the hasty departure of the President of Tunisia from the country, will be made on Saturday.

Traditional media such as TV Channel 5 and Izvestiya (as well as a few blogs) also use the term for riots instead of protests, which might reflect a more negative framing of events. Here are examples of MSM sentences from that cluster:

During the mass protests and ensuing riots in Egypt, 365 people have been killed and more than five thousand have been injured.

Egypt has descended into chaos and is preparing for new mass riots.

Most popular blogs are located far from the center of the map, and clustered around the terms Libya, Tunisia and sports, and also discussed the impact of the Internet on the protests. Below are illustrative sentences pulled from blogs:

I do not believe that the Russian authorities, the “tandem and company,” will take away the necessary lesson from the events in Tunisia and Egypt.

It [the Internet] is more often not used just as an information platform, but as a coordinator of this or that mass action…The revolutions in Egypt proved: social networks may be used as political instruments, and as long as access isn’t shut off, no censorship of the press will insulate authoritarian governments from mass action protests – the collective organizers of which today are Facebook and Twitter, and what is going to fill that arsenal tomorrow, it is even hard to imagine.

In light of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, even a complete idiot can understand the repression against activists in Triumph Square, the Strategy-31 activists, which has gone on for nearly two years, and also understand the intrigue surrounding Strategy-31. [Russian Federal] authorities, similar in spirit to their fellow authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, are scared to death of the possibilities that freedom of peaceful assembly will open for Russian citizens.

The Russian government, on the other hand, barely uses the word Egypt at all (not frequently enough to even generate a word cloud or to appear on the polar map). The government’s near silence on the political aspects of the Middle East protests ended with this televised statement by Medvedev on the 22nd of February, “These states are difficult, and it is quite probable that hard times are ahead, including the arrival at power of fanatics. This will mean fires for decades and the spread of extremism.”

Comparison to the US

A comparison of how Egypt was discussed in the US media ecosystem (including blogs) shows how different the Russian media space is to that in the United States for this topic. The US polar map is drawn with the White House as the central node and plots the content of popular blogs, political blogs, Top 25 mainstream media, and the White House over the same December to February time period as the Russia polar map. In the US, blogs are much more similar in their content to the White House than blogs in Russia are to the Kremlin, or even top 25 MSM. The content of the US blogs and mainstream media cluster primarily around the terms American and Mubarak. At first blush, this map seems to support media theories that argue the White House is the most important player in setting the media agenda, particularly in foreign affairs debates. However, it is interesting to note that there are some outliers in this map that are found further from the center. These include blog content clusters that use the terms Palin, War, Internet and Google. Below is a zoom in on the US polar map and the word cloud from the cluster of sources that most frequently use the term Palin relative to others.

Word Cloud: Palin Content Cluster

In conclusion, these first tests of Russian Media Cloud indicate that Russian popular blogs and opposition political blogs are the least similar to the Russian government when compared to Russian TV and popular mainstream media. Russian mainstream media are more similar to Russian TV and the Russian government than one might expect. If it is true that cosine similarity is a good automated method for identifying agendas in the different media sources we are tracking, then the similarity we observe seems to suggest that the Russian government has a significant influence on the agenda of traditional media, including Web-native media, and that blogs might provide an alternative agenda. For certain topics, such as the recent protests in the Middle East and North Africa, the difference between blog content and Russian government information channels is even more stark; the government is nearly silent on the protests, the MSM seems to have adopted the government frame of discussing ‘tourists’ and ‘riots’ more than protests, and a qualitative read of the sentences used by bloggers reinforces just how differently bloggers frame the Arab Spring compared to traditional media and the government.

Cross posted on the Internet & Democracy Blog.