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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
The ability to create and disseminate opinion makes blogs crucial while trying to
understand the building of political images and opinions.
On the other hand, Social Networks are the other main agents in the new digital
communication context. As we saw in the case of Spain, Internet users increasingly
use Social Networks in their daily digital routines, and as in the case of blogs, their
ability to expand individual opinion makes them essential for the study of political
opinion.
Finally, online media are the third element that we have studied, for they share the
same scenario as the Social Media but they represent the traditional agenda-setting
role of their fellow off-line versions.
The Nostracker System
A key problem while doing research on the Internet is the vast amount of information
available and the current absence of reliable methodology to systematically collect data
and successfully process it. To address this problem, Francisco Campos Freire,
Manuel Gago Mariño and Ana López Cepeda, researchers from the University of
Santiago de Compostela, have created and registered Nostracker, a reputation
management system that automatically monitors, classifies and researches certain
objects (such as brands, personalities or current day figures) in the Social Media (blogs
and social networks) and in the online mass media. Nostracker is able to identify
objects and traces of Internet conversations, define each actor, learn about temporal
evolution and establish ranking lists in function of presence in network (Campos,
Fernandes, 2011).
The Nostracker system is a model that is still evolving, and its goal is to integrate all the
Iberian Peninsula and Latin American blogosphere through all the Spanish and
Portuguese media ecosystem (online media, blogs and social networks) and also
through the Latin American blogosphere. For this reason, there are two Nostracker
systems working currently in Ecuador and Argentina to integrate the blogospheres of
the Andean and Mercosur area.
Nostracker enables us to measure the repercussion of new self-communicating mass
media (social and personal networks) on agenda-setting and framing as well as
relationship marketing. To achieve this level of analysis, the methodology used in all
the Nostracker research projects is very similar.
Firstly, we need to define the ‘objects’ that are going to be analyzed, i.e.; the topic,
brand or person that needs to be monitored. The first step is to give the object a name
that will identify it, in order to write the so-called ‘defining terms’ of that object. This
shall include all the possible ways of writing the name of the object and all its possible
variants (see Figure 1), and furthermore, writing the tags for that object.
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