I wasn´t sure at all how to approach something as diverse and intangible as ‘the Indonesian blogosphere’. For sure, I first needed to find out what Indonesian blogs look like and how they work, and of course what bloggers write about!

My first step to approach the Indonesian blogosphere systematically was to conduct a content analysis. That is to say, I chose a handful of blogs, read through their posts and categorized their content. Since my background is in cultural studies, it made sense to especially look at how the individual posts deal with things as cultural background, religion, belonging to certain social groups etc.

Of course, some additional information was also of interest to me, such as the identity of the author, the frequency of posting and so forth.


Method

There are more than 400.000 Indonesian blogs, so there really are plenty to choose from. I decided to choose the list of blogs that was published on pestablogger.com as my sample. (Pesta Blogger 2007 was the first nation-wide bloggers’ festival in Jakarta, held in October 2007) My thinking is as follows: the bloggers who participated at Pesta Blogger are likely to be dedicated bloggers who are in it for more than just a day. They probably aim at keeping their blogs up to date and of interest to fellow bloggers and readers. I could assume that blogs on that list somewhat represent the range of ideas and approaches that are relevant in the Indonesian blogosphere.

About 300 bloggers participated at Pesta Blogger and my first high goal was to pick at least 10% for my content analysis. Of these 30 blogs I wanted to each read and analyze the first 10 posts. It soon became apparent that this would take way too long, so I cut down the number of blogs to 10. These 10 blogs I chose randomly from the list.

Appart from sorting the connten of the posts to my categories, I also took the following data for each blog:

The language, The use of multimedia, the number of comments to each entry, the date of the first and the tenth entry, sex and origin of the author (if available), the perspective of the blog (wheter it´s written in a personal way or neutral) and the kind (whether it´s open to all kinds of content or has a fixed concept).

The analysis was conducted between the 3rd and 20th of December.

The results will take a bit longer... but I´ll post them as soon as possible!