CCK08: Asking for help on network analysis of a blogroom

Oh, I enjoyed Valdis Kreb`s presentation Emerging networks (there are .pdf slides) very much. Pretty new stuff for me. I would like very much to try this kind of analysis in my blogrooms. Let’s make an example to look for useful hints.

With blogroom I mean the subset of the blogosphere constituted by the blog of my students. The students have the option to use a blog or to follow the course in a conventional way. If they choose the blog they can use it exactly as one uses a new exercise book: when the course is finished they can continue to use it, they can keep it for record or throw it away. Some more details on the blogroom and on students opinions are in a previous post.

Here I focus on analysis of the results.

The example refers to the class of medicine, 220 students (19-20 year old), first year of curriculum, Spring 2008, three months course on computer literacy.

Distribution of activities:

• 145 entered the blogroom
• 30 studied contents and made a final multiple-choice test
• 7 cooperated in an open educational resources project
• 38 not yet finished

Total number of posts written during the three months: 2379

Total number of comments written during the three months: 1691

For each blog, I know how many posts have been written and how many comments have been received.

I used RSSOwL to extract these data.

It would be interesting to apply the analysis presented in Emerging networks to these data.

Two questions (before trying to write some code):

1. Is out there a tool to extract data from a given blog community (list of blog addresses)? For instance, extract, for each student, the number of comments written to a given other’s blog?
2. Which would be the most appropriate open source tool to generate data of the kind shown in Emerging networks and in Introduction to social network methods ?