As a first step in the webometric part of our project, we started with making an inventory of the web presence of the Slow Food Movement (SFM). After a few months of crawling the web this resulted in a URL database with a preliminary sum total of 1094. This database solely contains websites which are dedicated to the various organisational units of the SFM or to projects initiated by the SFM, like Cittaslow, Terra Madre, the Youth Food Movement and Earth Markets. As this figure of the web presence of the SFM shows, the movement is subject to a particular geography.
Mapping the web presence
The majority of the websites in the URL database (i.e. 1015) are linked to the individual chapters (the so-called convivia) as well as the national and regional associations within the SFM. Often these organisational units communicate about their ideas and practices via more than one website. They frequently use social media like Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Picasa and Twitter, but also blogging services like wordpress and blogspot to promote and discuss the SFM. Most intensely used, however, is Facebook. More than 1 in 5 websites in the sample was a Facebook-group and in many countries Facebook was the only detectable proof of the web presence of the SFM.
In our database, we did not include all social media. We focussed on Facebook and blogging services. Due to language barriers we were not able to discover if social networking sites like Mixi (Japan), Orkut (Brazil) and QZone (China) were used in similar ways as Facebook. Although GoogleTranslate proved to be a helpful tool for our web searches, the reach of our URL database is limited by language barriers.
A particular geography
As the figure shows, the web presence of the SFM has a few focal points: Italy, the United States, and, to a lesser degree, the United Kingdom, Japan, France and Canada. It should be noted, however, that some countries (e.g. Germany, Spain and the Netherlands) have one strong national website which also includes information on the local chapters. In those cases, the web presence in our database does not very adequately reflect the activity and diffusion of the movement in these particular countries.
In the next step of our analysis, we use web-link structure analysis to explore the relational composition of the SFM. This analysis focuses on the distribution of links among SFM websites and uses dedicated web-crawling software (SocSciBot) to explore these links.