Zusammen mit Harald Schoen und den Firmen Neolox und Searchmetrics habe ich in einem kurzem Report untersucht, wie Parteiseiten von der Suchmaschine Google bewertet werden und zu welchen Suchbegriffen Parteiwebseiten an prominenter Stelle in den Google Ergebnislisten angezeigt werden. Im Einzelnen untersuchten wir die Webseiten von Parteien im Bund sowie von Parteien in Berlin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern und Niedersachsen. Die wichtigsten Ergebnisse sind:

Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Webseiten der Bundesparteien prominent in den Google Ergebnislisten zu Anfragen nach Parteinamen und Spitzenpolitikern platziert sind. Wird nach tagesaktuellen oder allgemein politischen Begriffen gesucht, erscheinen die Webseiten der Bundesparteien nur vereinzelt und unsystematisch in den Ergebnislisten. Einzige Ausnahme ist die Piratenpartei.

Die Webseiten der Landesverbände von Parteien erscheinen nur prominent in Ergebnislisten, wenn gezielt nach Parteinamen und Kandidaten gesucht wird. Bei Suchanfragen zu tagesaktuellen und allgemein politischen Begriffen bleiben die Webseiten der von uns untersuchten Landesverbände (Berlin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern und Niedersachsen) überwiegend unsichtbar.

Gründe für die geringe Sichtbarkeit der Parteiwebseiten könnten unter anderem die für Suchmaschinen schwer verständliche Codierung der Seiten, ein vor allem auf eine ansprechende Optik bedachtes Seitendesign sowie die mangelnde redaktionelle Betreuung der auf den Seiten angebotenen Inhalte sein.

Die Ergebnisse unserer Untersuchung dokumentieren wir ausfürlich unter Sichtbarkeitsreport.de.

[Update: 26 September 2011]
Die folgenden Beiträge beziehen sich auf den Report:

Anika Kreller (26 September 2011) ‘Die Unsichtbaren’ news.de.

Thorsten Stegemann (26 September 2011) ‘Webseiten der politischen Parteien sind unsichtbar’ Telepolis – heise online.

fgpk.de (13 September 2011) ‘Wie sichtbar sind die Websiten politischer Parteien für Suchmaschinen?’.

Philipp Albrecht (12 September 2011) ‘Was Parteien online verbessern können’ politik-digital.de.

Andreas Jungherr, David J. Ludwigs und Harald Schoen (12 September 2011) ‘Wie sichtbar sind die Webseiten politischer Parteien für Suchmaschinen?’ ZEIT Online: Zweitstimme.

Andreas Jungherr (12 September 2011)‘ Die Suchmaschinensichtbarkeit von Parteiwebseiten’ PolitCamp Blog.

Eva Schweitzer und Steffen Albrecht (Hrsg.): Das Internet im Wahlkampf: Analysen zur Bundestagswahl 2009

Just got news that Eva Schweitzer’s and Steffen Albrecht’s edited volume “Das Internet im Wahlkampf: Analysen zur Bundestagswahl 2009” is out. The book collects papers that address different aspects of the internet’s role in the campaign for the German general election of 2009. Pascal Jürgens and I contributed a paper on the use of Twitter during the campaign called “Wahlkampf vom Sofa aus: Twitter im Bundestagswahlkampf 2009″ [SpringerLink] [preprint in German].

The collection offers a broad perspective on the state of political internet use in Germany. It also contains interesting pieces by Steffen Albrecht who writes about blogs, Jesscia Kunert and Jan Schmidt who write about social networking sites, Thorsten Faas and Julia Partheymüller who write on political internet use in Germany, Thomas Roessing and Nicole Podschuweit who focus on political uses of Wikipedia, Christoph Bieber who comments on the role of online tools in the overall party campaigning strategies and Eva Schweitzer who focuses on political websites during the campaign. There are many other interesting articles in this collection so if you are interested in the topic be sure to check it out.

Abstract: Electronic petitions can serve as an influential mechanism for political participation. We present a study on the dynamics in the German e-petition system which was introduced in late 2008. Drawing on a data set of signatures, we analyze four aspects: (a) the types of petitions found, (b) the temporal dynamics of petitions, (c) the types of users found, and (d) the intersection of different petitions’ supporter populations. We present evidence that (a) the system is dominated by a very small number of high-volume petitions and (b) these high-volume petitions have a delayed boosting effect on the base activity in the petition system. We furthermore (c) present a typology of users, showing that although highly active “new lobbyists” and “hit-and-run activists” exist, one- or two-time petitioners have the largest impact. Finally, it is indicated that (d) many of the high-volume petitions share a significant part of their user base, hinting at a complex, topically motivated network of supporters. Through the application of methods from what has been called “Computational Social Sciences,” we illuminate a highly relevant field of political behavior online, while demonstrating the capability of data-driven approaches in such novel domains.

A copy of the paper is available on the website of the journal.

Jungherr, Andreas and Jürgens, Pascal (2010) “The Political Click: Political Participation through E-Petitions in Germany,” Policy & Internet: Vol. 2: Iss. 4, Article 6.

DOI: 10.2202/1944-2866.1084

At the conference I presented the paper “The political click: political participation through e-petitions in Germany” written by Pascal Jürgens and me on the use of the German e-petition system. A copy of the paper can be found on the conference microsite hosted by the Oii. There the other papers presented at the conference are also available for download. An updated version of the paper will appear later this year in the peer-reviewed journal Policy & Internet. Since the edits were significant advances on the version available the Oii site I would ask you, if you are interested in the paper, to reference the published version.

The conference has been covered on a number of blogs. For example on:

OII Blog
Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: What is our impact on the Internet? Keynote by Arthur Lupia
Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: Political Participation and Petitioning
Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: Campaigning in the 2010 UK General Election
Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: Closing keynote by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: Wrap-Up

ICTlogy by Ismael Peña-López
Internet, Politics, Policy (I). Arthur Lupia: An impact Assessment
Internet, Politics, Policy (II). Political Participation and Petitioning
Internet, Politics, Policy (III). Participation in Politics and Policy-making
Internet, Politics, Policy (IV). Comparative Campaigning (I)
Internet, Politics, Policy (V). Campaigning: UK2010 Election
Internet, Politics, Policy (VI). Digital Divides
Internet, Politics, Policy (VII). Internet Governance (II)
Internet, Politics, Policy (VIII). Viktor Mayer-Schönberger: Delete. The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

Digital Government – Digital Society
Internet, Politics, Policy Conference – Day 1
IPP Conference – Day 2

[Update 2010/12/20]
Richard Parsons [@problybored] was kind enough to write a short wrap up on the Oii draft of “The political click: political participation through e-petitions in Germany” on his blog eDemocracyBlog.com.

Digital Activism Decoded Cover

Recently the debate about the nature and effiacy of digital activism has become increasingly heated. Compare for example the dialogue between Patrick Meier and Evgeny Morozov. The first optimism of the early days has given way to a more balanced view on the motivation and effects of digital activism. In this ongoing debate a new book “Digital Activism Decoded: The New Mechanics of Change” edited by Mary Joyce offers a collection of texts that deal with digital activism from different perspectives. Mary offers her rationale for the book in this interview.

For this collection I cowrote a chapter with Dan Schultz with the title “Applications: Picking the Right One in a Transient World”. The chapter discusses practical questions, which activists have to face when choosing digital tools for their campaigns. The chapter is no scientific text, instead it tries to offer a practical guideline by which activists can make sense out of the many digital tools out there.

You can download the entire book for free at the Meta-Activism Project or order a paperbased version at amazon be it .de or .com.

[Update 2010/07/29]
Since its publication the book has received a fair amount of coverage:

The German publication Der Freitag has a review of the book.

The blog Sealing the Generation Gap reviews Dan’s and my chapter: “All human wisdom is contained in two words: wait and hope.” Must say, any review that mentions “The Count of Monte Christo” and a text of mine in the same article puts a smile on my face.

Also the authors of other chapters have been actively blogging on the publication of the book:

Steven J. Murdoch blogs on his chapter: “Destructive Activism: The Double-Edged Sword of Digital Tactics“.

Dave Karpf blogs on his chapter: “Measuring the Success of Digital Campaigns“.

Simon Columbus blogs on his chapter: “The New Casualties: Prisons and Persecution“.

In addition to that there is a video of a discussion with Mary Joyce at the New America Foundation.

Photo (c) Mary Joyce

In this paper I use four case studies to illustrate potential uses of Twitter for political activists. The paper was drafted in early 2008 and written in the autumn of the same year. So unfortunately I didn’t address Twitter’s Iran-moment. Still, although some of the examples in the paper may seem dated I hope the lessons drawn from the case studies are still relevant. Judge for yourself.

The paper runs at around 3900 words. If that is a bit daunting have a look at this presentation. This should contain the main idea of the paper. The complete text can be found here.

This paper laid the groundwork for the DigiActive Guide to Twitter for Activism. It also contains other ideas like the use of Twitter as an information distribution tool or as a communication backchannel which also found their way in other papers.

Andreas Jungherr (2008) ‘Twittering Activists: the Uses of Twitter for Political Activism’. Paper presented at “Social Web: Towards Networked Protest Politics?” Organized by the SFB Changing Protest and Media Cultures SFB/FK 615 Media Upheavals University of Siegen, Germany on 7-8 November.

For a short glance at the argument have a look at the presentation. The full paper can be found here.

Andreas Jungherr (2009) ‘Digital channels, the change in community structures and its consequences for social participation’. Paper presented at the ISEA 2009: International Symposium for the Electronic Arts, University of Ulster, Belfast, UK on 23 August – 1 September 2009.

The interplay of theory and observation: a proposition for structured research on human behavior on the web

The paper makes for a nice change of pace since it’s neither concerned with Twitter nor with agent-based modeling. Instead we used the chance of the first Web Science conference to try our hands in a bit of computational social science methodology. Be it only to escape the claim of our dear friends from the theory department we would only be a group of empiricistic heathens. Have a look at the paper at the online proceedings of the WebSci’09: Society On-Line and judge if we succeeded.

For the gist of the paper have a look at the presentation:

In this paper we build on the work we presented in Modeling Small-Group Interaction on Pervasive Digital Channels: New Influence on Public Opinion’. In contrast to the earlier work in this paper we focused on the potential agent-based modeling holds for the social sciences in general.

Pascal Jürgens and Andreas Jungherr (2009) ‘Twittering Dissent: Social Web Data Streams as Basis for Agent Based Models of Opinion Dynamics’, in: Martin Welker, Holger Geißler, Lars Kaczmirek, Olaf Wenzel (eds.), 11th General Online Research Conference, GOR 09: Proceedings, Vienna, p. 81.

Modeling Small Group Interaction on Pervasive Digital Channels

In this poster we used the big Lacy/Zuckerberg dustup at the SXSW 2008 to gain some deeper understanding in the dynamics of communication via Twitter. To this end agent based modeling proved to be a very promising research tool.

The Lacy/Zuckerberg session gave a first glimpse on the negative effects of a communication backchannel running wild. Since then other incidents proved the relevance of more research into that phenomenon.

For a closer look at our poster check out the pdf on the publication page for Modeling Small-Group Interaction on Pervasive Digital Channels on this blog.