Presenting diverse political opinions: how and how much
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Bloggers and Readers Blogging Together: Collaborative Co-creation of Political Blogs
Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Detecting forum authority claims in online discussions
LSM '11 Proceedings of the Workshop on Languages in Social Media
Political blend: an application designed to bring people together based on political differences
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Communities and Technologies
Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
Information Polity - Key Factors and Processes for Digital Government Success
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In the last decade, blogs have exploded in number, popularity and scope. However, many commentators and researchers speculate that blogs isolate readers in echo chambers, cutting them off from dissenting opinions. Our empirical paper tests this hypothesis. Using a hand-coded sample of over 1,000 comments from 33 of the world's top blogs, we find that agreement outnumbers disagreement in blog comments by more than 3 to 1. However, this ratio depends heavily on a blog's genre, varying between 2 to 1 and 9 to 1. Using these hand-coded blog comments as input, we also show that natural language processing techniques can identify the linguistic markers of agreement. We conclude by applying our empirical and algorithmic findings to practical implications for blogs, and discuss the many questions raised by our work.