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<Paper uid="W06-1706">
  <Title>Web Coverage of the 2004 US Presidential Election</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="39" end_page="40" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
7 Conclusion and Future Research
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The US Election 2004 Web Monitor provided a weekly snapshot of international Web coverage, measuring attention and attitude towards the US presidential candidates. Keywords grouped by political party and geographic region summarize issues associated with each candidate.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Compared to the Web sites of news media, campaign managers have less control of spin and impact in media that rely on citizenry for message turnover (Howard 2003). Extending the current system will allow measuring information propagation, not only among corporate Web sites but also via Web logs, online discussion forums and other forms of personal publishing. Investigating the propagation of political content in such environments requires large samples to measure spatial effects, and frequent monitoring to account for temporal effects.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> For measuring information propagation, Gruhl et al. (Gruhl, Guha et al. 2004) suggest distinguishing between internally driven, sustained discussions (chatter) and externally induced sharp rises in activity (spikes). Occasionally, spikes result from chatter through resonance when insignificant events trigger massive reactions. Resonance occurs when individual interactions generate large-scale, collective behavior, often showing a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Social network analysis attempts to explain such macroscopic propagation of information between people, groups and organizations (Kumar, Raghavan et al. 2002). By disseminating information via their social networks, individuals create strong peer influence that often surpasses exogenous influences.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Efforts to create a more responsible electorate (Dutton, Elberse et al. 1999) can leverage this peer influence to trigger self-reinforcing content propagation among individuals. Relationships between these individuals determine the paths of information dissemination. It is along these paths that inter-individual communication multiplies the impact of spikes and creates widespread attention. Knowledge on the structure and determinants of these paths could help promote issueoriented voting. This in turn would lead to a better-informed electorate aware of its leadership choices, and able to hold decision-makers accountable. null  Modeling the production, propagation and consumption of political Web will help address four research questions: How redundant is Web content, and what technical and organizational factors influence information flows within the network? Can existing models of information propagation such as hub-and-spoke, syndication and peer-to-peer adequately explain these information flows? How does Web content influence public opinion, and what are appropriate methods to measure and model the extent, dynamics and latency of this process? Finally, which content placement strategies increase the impact on the target audience and support self-reinforcing propagation among individuals? Acknowledgements. Our first word of appreciation goes to Jamie Murphy for his ongoing support throughout the project. We would also like to thank Astrid Dickinger, Wilhelm Langenberger, Wei Liu, Antonijo Nikolic, Maya Purushothaman, Dave Webb and Mark Winkler for their valuable help and suggestions. The US Election 2004 Web Monitor represents an initiative of the Research Network on Environmental Online Communication (www.ecoresearch.net), cooperating with the University of Western Australia, Graz University of Technology, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, and the Know-Center, which is funded by the Austrian Competence Center program Kplus under the auspices of the Austrian Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology (http://www.ffg.at) and by the State of Styria.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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