sidebar of their blog. In some cases, the name of the blog actually reflected their policy
interest. Because the bloggers who focus on international affairs and the war on Iraq are
an unusually diffuse group, I chose to focus on American bloggers with domestic policy
agendas. Since there is a very high rate of blog abandonment, the sample was also
isolated to bloggers who posted on a regular basis for at least nine months.
Using reputational and content analysis, I created nonrandom sample of nine
bloggers who focused on one policy issue on their blog. Policy bloggers are still too few
in number to be isolated by employing more random methods. Bloggers were chosen
from a variety of policy areas and political ideologies. These bloggers were found
award, the Koufax, to the best liberal bloggers. Their 2005 semi-finalist list for “Best
Single Interest Blog” was a good source of liberal, policy bloggers (Williams 2006). In
addition, some policy bloggers were located through recommendations of other bloggers.
Since there are no directories of blogs categorized by topic, creating samples of subsets
of bloggers is very difficult. Appendix C discusses the methodological challenges to
studying blogs.
To gather further information about the methods and experiences of policy
bloggers, I reviewed the current posts and the sidebar of their blogs. I also conducted
nine interviews during the July and August of 2006. Interviews provided the in-depth
information needed to provide a rich picture of the activities of policy bloggers. (See
Appendix A for the interview instrument.) The interview lasted for approximately 50
minutes and included 53 questions.
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Convention