When I heard about the Impz's paper/thesis, he only mentioned that a) his major was media economics, and b) he studies anime blogs and collects some data on links. It sounded a bit strange, because media economics people study things like the way ownership and consolidation affect the news coverage; they are not content oriented. So it sounded more like something they do in media communications rather. Yesterday he posted more details, which make it clearer. Apparently the economics part comes in through the SEO angle. SEO sounds evil, but I suppose a man has to do what is necessary. I wish him success and many publications. He'll need at least three conference papers and a peer-reviewed journal article before Annenberg will consider him.

Another notable thing about it, nobody wants to study blog comments. Links carry additional information which can be tapped for publication, but comments are just foam floating across the ocean of blogs for the most part. Sometimes they get together to form giant islands of scum, like Slashdot. But studying that would be studying an entirely different phenomena, a something that group comm and/or anthropology majors do.