The Studies of Blogs and Online Communities: From Information to Knowledge and Action

Abstract

This research addresses the question of whether the rise of blogs as a rich information source may create new opinion leaders that transform and challenge the traditionally held public views on drugs and European health care. We investigate blogs that discuss issues related to European healthcare and European pharmaceuticals for a selected 6 months period. In our approach of the blog space we take a sociological perspective, and design a multistage methodology for data collection and data analysis that differs from the traditionally used crawling techniques by computer scientists.