Blogs help to detect and analyse social trends

Researchers in the University at Buffalo's School of Informatics have undertaken a long-term research project to study how information from blogs produced in specific American urban areas reflects the political agendas, opinions, attitudes and cultural idiosyncrasies of the general population of those places. Some of their finding from their press release:

- American blog distribution correlates positively with the distribution of the U.S. population, with most bloggers heavily concentrated in large cities in coastal areas and their surrounding suburbs (New York; Boston; Los Angeles; Chicago; San Francisco; Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia)
- New-technology and economic centers and clusters have formed large groups of bloggers. Among them are the San Francisco Bay area; Austin; Houston; Atlanta; Orange County, Calif.; the region east of Phoenix (Mesa, Chandler and Tempe); Las Vegas, and Portland
- Suburbs and regions surrounding big cities such as Detroit; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; Boston; Phoenix; Los Angeles; Dallas, and Seattle have blogger groups comparable in size to those of their center cities.
- There are very few blog concentrations in the inland U.S., particularly the Midwest.
- The densest concentration of bloggers is found in areas traditionally associated with "culture elites" and high socioeconomic status: Average household incomes in which the majority of blog-clusters are found are, at around $59,000, higher than the national average and in six of those 26 areas, average household income is more than $100,000.
"We cannot ignore the blog," says Jia Lin, one of the responsible study conductors, "it is a rapidly emerging political and cultural entity whose importance is likely to increase. It is our contention that blogs not only tell us about those who write them, but quite a bit about particular urban areas in which we find them."