`Six Blogs of Separation‘, my guest article on Woopra.com, was published today. In it, I explore the utility of recent technological innovations to answer existing sociological research questions. The internet is still a relatively new medium and with the rise of blogging, it becomes really interesting to investigate the social consequences of this new way of connecting to other people. Will social cleavages diminish, or will existing social cleavages remain in the blogosphere? But, how to accurately combine information on both internet behavior with background- and other characteristics of interest to the social scientist?

Woopra is a cool new web-analytics software package, enabling web-masters to gain enormously detailed information on the visitors of their site. The information is so detailed, I argue, that it can be used in scientific research, especially when combined with data collected on a large number of other websites and blogs. Using the web to survey some of the participants allows for answering very detailed questions in a new and exciting way.

The full article can be found on the Woopra forum. In a while, it will be published on my own site as well, for reference sake.