A bit of a follow-up for Weblog networks as social ecosystems.
Let’s say that there are cases then community-like structures emerge as a result of connections between bloggers. This is immediately brings a few questions:
- What is their nature? How do we call them? They are probably not communities, but more loosely-coupled networks of people. Mainly weak ties, but still high degree of awareness of each other.
- How do we find them? There is no single “community space”, just interconnected networks of weblogs. Where would you draw a boundary?
- What are their characteristics? How and when do they develop? change? die?
Hope to find answers one day… So far just a couple of things:
A. Before there is a good term I’m going to call them “weblog communities”.
B. How to define who belongs to a weblog community:
- People who say they belong together – interviews?
- People with similar focus – directories? topicExchange?
- People who share language – content analysis? trend discovery?
- People who link to each other weblogs (using blogroll links and/or links in the text and remembering that these are different) – link analysis?
- People who read each other weblogs on regular basis (e.g. using RSS subscriptions) – RSS Neighborhood?
- Some/all of the above? Something else?
For an inspiration:
- The function of language to facilitate and maintain social networks in research weblogs by Stephanie Hendrick
- Mapping weblog communities by Juan-J. Merelo-Guervos, Beatriz Prieto, Fatima Rateb, Fernando Tricas
- A topic sharing infrastructure for weblog networks by Sebastien Paquet & Phillip Pearson
- Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community by Cameron Marlow
- Alex Halavais on connections and network visualisation in academic weblogs (for a side-trip check follow-up discussion on references as popolarity measure: David Brake, Seb Paquet and Alex)
- Of course, you may also read other papers on mapping various things in the blogosphere (here or here), but they are not really on communities :)
This post also appears on channel weblog research
Tags: blog communities, blog ecosystem, blog researchArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/06/18.html#a1245; comments are here.
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