In search for a virtual settlement: An exploration of weblog community boundaries (original) (raw)
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Finding'the life between buildings': An approach for defining a weblog community
Internet Research, 2005
Although weblogs are perceived as low-threshold tools to publish online, empowering individual expression in public, there is growing evidence of social structures evolving around weblogs and their influence on norms and practices of blogging. Emerging from connections between weblogs and their authors, weblog communities often do not have a shared space, clear boundaries, or clear membership, challenging researchers who want to study them. Initially intended to be a study in the delineation of weblog boundaries, the scope of defining these boundaries immediately overwhelmed traditional methods and tools. The problems that arose from using traditional link mining methods led to an exploration of alternative approaches of defining these communities. The purpose of this paper is to get an insight into methods of finding "life between buildings": virtual settlements where weblog communities may reside. We use Jones' (1997) theory of a virtual settlement and archaeological metaphor to address research challenges of locating weblog communities, suggest an iterative approach that includes refinement of research methods based on assumptions about community norms, practices and artefacts, and propose which artefacts could serve as indicators of community presence. Finally we present a pilot study which explores different methods of identifying community membership beginning with a known core member of a group of knowledge management bloggers.
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Weblogs (blogs)-frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence-are the latest genre of Internet communication to attain widespread popularity, yet their characteristics have not been systematically described. This paper presents the results of a quantitative content analysis of 203 randomly-selected weblogs, comparing the empirically observable features of the corpus with popular claims about the nature of weblogs, and finding them to differ in a number of respects. Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented towards external events, and underestimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self-expression. Based on the profile generated by the empirical analysis, we consider the likely antecedents of the blog genre, situate it with respect to the dominant forms of digital communication on the Internet today, and suggest possible developments of the use of weblogs over time in response to changes in user behavior, technology, and the broader ecology of Internet genres.
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Brava! Great articles, nice layout (though I'd prefer slightly darker text for readability), and excellent use of blog infrastructure to enable reader feedback and interactivity. You've set a great example for us all in both content and presentation.
2005
Weblogs are not only one of the newest technical media for communication, but also one of the most difficult to understand. Are weblogs a kind of mass medium, a personal medium like an online diary, or a medium that gives space for communities to grow? Or are weblogs a medium that enable all these possibilities depended on the actual use? This paper throws some light on what weblogs are by using the methodology of Media Sociography . Media Sociography is a strategy for analysing mediated social systems or in other words a strategy for describing the social in relation to the media it is based on. Theoretically seen it is inspired of two theoretical paradigms the Sociological Systems Theory of Niklas Luhmann and the Media Theory (also called the Toronto school). Empirically the paper primary draws on the literature about weblogs, which could be framed as CMC-studies, but uses also firsthand observations. The purpose of this paper is to describe the communicative space of weblogs and the social processes within that space and by that answering the mentioned questions. The paper concludes that the remediation of social interaction in blogs provide the same good basis for distributing identity and identification of persons as the traditional website, but because of the many interactivity features they also make a good basis for turntaking in conversations and therefore also make space for self-organizing interaction systems. Weblogs are an extension of the social space as symbolically generalised cyberspace avatars that combine communicability and personification. Blogs transform the WWW to one big newsgroup where homepages as representations of persons, perform a medium by which people can stay in contact with many different social contexts, introduce themselves in new contexts and even make their own press, using the blog as a mass medium.
Weblogging: Implementing communities of practice
Social inclusion: Societal and …, 2006
This paper centers on the emergent phenomenon ofweblogging. Even though the total number ofweblogs is increasing at an exponential rate, little formal study has been done on this phenomenon. This paper provides two main contributions. First, it describes the phenomenon of weblogging and conceptualizes it, discussing significant attributes ofweblogs that set it apart from traditional communication means. Second, it establishes a framework grounded in the theory of communities of practice that provides a lens to study the potential role of weblogging in organizational communication. The research approach is qualitative and analysis is done by interpreting the content of a weblog through a hermeneutic approach. Weblogging can be seen to foster social inclusion based on its characteristics and nature. Our study shows that by its features of interaction and informality, weblogging cultivates social inclusion, particularly that of employees working in a corporation. The paper concludes by reflecting on the potential of weblogging for enabling informal means of communication in organizations.
Understanding Weblog Communities Through Digital Traces: A Framework, a Tool and an Example
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Often research on online communities could be compared to archaeology [16] : researchers look at patterns in digital traces that members leave to characterise the community they belong to. Relatively easy access to these traces and a growing number of methods and tools to collect and analyse them make such analysis increasingly attractive. However, a researcher is faced with the difficult task of choosing which digital artefacts and which relations between them should be taken into account, and how the findings should be interpreted to say something meaningful about the community based on the traces of its members. In this paper we present a framework that allows categorising digital traces of an online community along five dimensions (people, documents, terms, links and time) and then describe a tool that supports the analysis of community traces by combining several of them, illustrating the types of analysis possible using a dataset from a weblog community.
A Bosom Buddy Afar Brings a Distant Land Near: Are Bloggers a Global Community?
Communities and Technologies 2005, 2005
Information communication technologies on the Internet such as Usenet, Internet relay chats and multi-user dungeons have been used to enable virtual communities. However, a new form of technology, the weblog, or "blog", has quickly risen as a means for self-expression and sharing knowledge for people across geographic distance. Though studies have focused on blogs in Western countries, our study targets the global blogging community. Inspired by previous studies that show significant differences in technology practices across cultures, we conducted a survey to investigate the influence of regional culture on a blogging community. We asked the research question of whether bloggers are more influenced by their local cultures with respect to their sense of community, or rather whether a "universal" Internet culture is a stronger influence of community feeling. Our results, based on a multilingual worldwide blogging survey of 1232 participants from four continents show that while smaller differences could be found between Eastern and Western cultures, overall the global blogging community is indeed dominated by an Internet culture that shows no profound differences across cultures. However, one significant exception was found in Japanese bloggers and their concealment of identity.