Macrophilia

Billing itself as the place for "large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them," (theinfo) is an excellent resource for those curious - and experienced - about meaningfully engaging the vast volumes of content that comes with an online world.

Whether your focus is on content/data acquisition, analysis, or representation, there are mailing lists, data sets (or visualizations), and experienced advice available. (theinfo) is crowd-sourced - while the community appears small now, the potential exists for this to become a fantastic resource.

First-person reporting

Ad hoc, first-person reporting from disasters and emergencies is now an established practice (e.g., the 2004 tsunami, or hurricane Katrina). With mash-ups, it has become common to situate such accounts within their geographical context (e.g., Google Earth kml layers for the London attacks).

Those interested in such phenomena should check out Ushahidi, which tracks Kenya's post-election violence. Local residents may submit incident reports via SMS, which viewers can later filter by location or type.

Analyzing text

For those interested in fully and semi-automated approaches to analyzing unstructured text, the Text Analytics Wiki offers a way to familiarize yourselves with the range of techniques available, and to stay on top of the latest developments in the field.

A ton of content is already available - the TA Wiki links to relevant news aggregators, listservs, blogs, universities and private researchers, issue papers, software, conferences, and more.

Truly, a rich resource. Especially as documented political discourse so dramatically expanding with the growth of e-governance, campaign websites, blogs, and other online media.