User 4: Graydon, Communications Studies Professor

When he hears about a Russian blogger causing controversy by speaking out against Russian involvement of Latvian affairs, G.G. starts a repository to track him. He is still unsure of what his end goal is, but knows that this story may well informing his research. What JiTR offers to him is two things: the ability to save posts in case they get taken down, and a malleability of working with and sort posts. He sets up an aggregate function to pull posts from the blog. In the options, Graydon sets the history feature, to update the item daily if it has changed on the site. Graydon worries that the blogger may suddenly turn coy, and silently start rewriting old posts to be less inflammatory. If that were to happen, which it thus far has not, Graydon would be able to work through a timeline of his item. How the function has proved useful is by providing a snapshot of a specific time. When there is an online mention of any of the blogger's posts, Graydon can see exactly where the comments were when the mention was published, and can retrace how it may have affected the bloggers comments.

Graydon tracks mentions of the blog, and chooses to do it within the same repository (for an easy view of the entire situation as it unfolds). Since the two functions are mixed, he sets the items that are pulled from the blog to be highlighted in bright yellow, so as to stand out. He also likes the timeline graph function, which shows Graydon the frequency of online mentions at any given time, and lets him track how much activity there is as a result of every new post.

• Graydon is tracking a Latvian blogger. His end result is analysis, but he does not know how. For know, it's just tracking
• he sets up an ongoing aggregator, which takes the syndicated blog feed and pulls it into JiTR
• he turns on the history feature, which tracks for post changes and updates repository items with a new version number
• Graydon tracks mentions of the blog also, within the same repository
• Graydon sets the colour of the Latvian blogger's items to have a highlighted yellow background