This study explores the structure and content of the Arabic blogosphere using link analysis, term frequency analysis, and human coding of individual blogs. We identified a base network of approximately 35,000 Arabic-language blogs, mapped the 6000 most-connected blogs, and hand coded over 3000. The study is a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arabic-speaking world, which mainly clusters nationally. We found the most politically active areas of the network to be clusters of bloggers in Egypt, Kuwait, Syria, and the Levant, as well as an ‘English Bridge’ group. Differences among these indicate variability in how online practices are embedded in local political contexts. Bloggers are focused mainly on domestic political issues; concern for Palestine is the one issue that unites the entire network. Bloggers link preferentially to the top Web 2.0 sites (e.g. YouTube and Wikipedia), followed by pan-Arab mainstream media sources, such as Al Jazeera.

The reasons for scholars' interest in Kafka, particularly his short masterpiece, "Metamorphosis,'' reflect a recognition on the part of students of religion, philosophy, psychoanalysis, political and social criticism, Marxism, and literature that Kafka's work is inexhaustible. No single interpretation invalidates or finally delivers the story's significance. Its quality of multivalency (Vieldeutigkeit) keeps us talking to each other, against each other, and to ourselves. For fifty years Kafka's work has been seeding thought and precluding that closure of discourse that would imprison us in our old histories. Yet until 1980, genderbased theories and feminist criticisms were rarely articulated in discussions of Kafka's
stories

Changes in the information society, especially the rise of blogs, have refocused attention on
questions of media modality, source identification, and motivation in online environments.
We manipulate the structure of a blogger’s critique on a news story (global vs. interspersed)
and the partisan target of the blogger (Democrats vs. Republicans) in an experiment
embedded in an online survey. Our results support our expectations: The more difficult
story format decreases the ability of less motivated readers to correctly identify the source
of their information, without affecting the motivated. These effects of structure on source
identification are democratically consequential when people rely on blogs for facts about
public affairs without the proper cautionary caveats regarding the credibility of the source.