Research on Irish Blogosphere

While there is ongoing research into the phenomenon that is blogging much of it is US based which arguably limits the generizability of findings. I could be wrong but research on blogging in Ireland seems to be practically nonexistent. A postgraduate student at WIT is undertaking research with the institute's e-learning group on Weblogs as Learning Tools and has some interesting links here. Does anyone else know of any other? - either research on blogging in Ireland or research being down by anyone in Ireland about blogging in general?

Increasingly Irish newspapers are publishing articles in their business and technology sections which deal with blogging. However my first impressions would be that members of the Irish Blogosphere feel many of these are ill-informed - see Lots of Blogs but few talking about Irish matters and more recently Business Post talks business blogging - not one Irish Blog mentioned. Then again it could be argued there's no such thing as bad publicity - better a bad article than no article at all?

The Irish Blog Awards which have been billed as the “inaugural celebration of Ireland’s online blogging community” are due to be held this month in Dublin. Perhaps the PR surrounding the awards may help to propel blog sites into public consciousness in a more positive way?.