I has been struggling for a while to figure out how comes that ‘individualistic’ weblogs support community formation. Paul Hodkinson provides an elegant answer to my question in his chapter on LJ goths in Uses of blogs:

Wellman and Gulia have distinguished between superficial “weak ties,” which are confined to a narrow shared interest and take place within a single domain, and “strong ties,” which involve extensive familiarity and are played out in a variety of domains. Through enabling individual goths to read about and comment upon a variety of aspects of one another’s individual, everyday lives, rather than just those aspects directly related to the goth scene, online journals played an important part in the development of strong, intimate relationships between them, which nearly always extended to other forms of interpersonal communication, whether email, online chat, mobile phone, or, most importantly, face-to-face interaction. In turn, the development and/or reinforcement of such strong, multiplex ties between goths served to reinforce participants’ general sense of investment in and attachment to the goth scene as a community. (pp.191-192)

Other interesting things in the chapter: moving from group spaces to weblogs, descriptions of online/offline dynamic around goth events, blogs as a way to reinforce culture. It’s about goths, but lots of things apply to other blogging subcultures (KM blogging, for example :)

References:

Hodkinson, P. (2006). Subcultural Blogging? Online Journals and Group Involvement among UK Goths, in A.Bruns & J. Jacobs (Eds.), Uses of blogs, pp. 187-197. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Wellman, B. and M. Gulia (1999) `Virtual Communities as Communities: Net Surfers Don’t Ride Alone’, in M. Smith and P. Kollock (Eds.), Communities in Cyberspace, pp. 163—90. London: Routledge.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/16.html#a1955; comments are here.

• Ideal intellectual communities
• International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
• The fun of others blogging for you :)

Anjo Anjewierden and Lilia Efimova. Understanding weblog communities through digital traces: a framework, a tool and an example. In Proceedings International Workshop on Community Informatics (COMINF 2006), pp. 279-289, Montpellier, 2006 (November). Springer, LNCS 4277.

Abstract. Often research on online communities could be compared to archaeology (Jones, 1997): researchers look at patterns in digital traces that members leave to characterise the community they belong to. Relatively easy access to those 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 difficult tasks of choosing which digital artefacts and which relations between them should be taken into account, and how the finding 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.

I should blog it a while ago :)

Anyway, the paper is good to get an idea of what we (Anjo, me, Rogier Brussee and Robert de Hoog) have been doing behind the scenes in respect to understanding and visualising patterns in weblog communities.

For more:

• Anjo’s posts on the workshop and the framework (and lots of other things in the archives)
• my post on artefacts and practices in weblog research
• “research challenges” section in unpublished paper with Stephanie (published version lost some of the discussion relevant to this post)

Hmm, given how many bits and pieces are already there I should write more on it…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/08.html#a1852; comments are here.

• Outliner use patterns
• Papers from AAAI 2006 Symposia on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs
• KM bloggers community

Nancy worked out an advanced version of her thinking on blog communities into an article Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community? at The Knowledge Tree. Haven’t read it yet, but printed out for reading in the plane tomorrow.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/09/12.html#a1831; comments are here.

• A Brief Overview of the Linguistic Attributes of the Blogosphere
• Public Displays of Connection
• Formation of norms in a blog community

Nancy White has a great series on blog communities. Too much to summarise, so you have to check for yourself (titles of 2-5 are mine, but based on the content):

• Part 1: Framing the Issue
• Part 2. Blog-centric blog communities
• Part 3. Topic-centric blog communities
• Part 4. Community-centric blog communities
• Part 5. Implications and other questions

A few thoughts:

I’d also think on platform-centric communities (e.g. “LiveJournal community”, although I wouldn’t define it as a community and would talk about LJ subcommunities). Those have many elements of community-centric blog communities, but do not necessary have “other” tools or share a common focus. They may emerge out of coincidence of sharing same space (similar to the communities that could emerge from people living in the same neighbourhood) since making cross-platform connections are likely to be more difficult than connecting inside the platform (and some platforms actually lock people inside with no RSS, obligatory registration and other tricks).

Something else – what happens when a weblog belongs to multiple (type of) communities at the same time? During the meeting in London where Nancy presented those ideas and I commented on that, someone suggested that my blog is a center of blog-centric community. I don’t believe so, but let’s imagine it’s true. My weblog is also part of several topic-centric communities that do not necessarily overlap (e.g. KM community and internet/weblog research community).

Dina touches another side of it:

Reading the whole series, Nancy raises many issues which I struggle with. I think some of us straddle all three types of blogging — I am a blog-centric blogger with Conversations with Dina, a topic-centric blogger with a loosely-knit communities around social media, ethnography, qualitative research; and have been and am a community-centric blogger with Worldchanging (GULP – no posts there for ages from me) and all the Help blogs. Would be interesting to see how my behaviour and interactions vary depending on where or what I am blogging.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/26.html#a1808; comments are here.

• Paper – Blogging Practices: An analytical framework
• Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, community and culture of weblogs
• BlogTalk 2.0: coopetition and research blogging

If you are in weblog research make sure you email Jan Schmidt for the draft paper on blogging practices (hmm, if everyone would ask Jan he will be left without qualified blind reviewers for the journal publication he is thinking about):

Abstract. The diffusion of weblogs over the last years has led to a differentiation of blogging practices. This paper proposes a general analytical model to analyse and compare different uses of the weblog format. Its main argument is that individual usage episodes are framed by three structural dimensions of rules, relations and code, which in turn are constantly (re)produced in social action. As a result, “communities of blogging practices” emerge, that is groups of people who share certain routines and expectations about the use of Weblogs as a software tool for information-, identity- and relationship management. To illustrate these conceptual ideas, findings from a large-scale survey (N=5.246) of the german-speaking blogosphere are presented, focussing on sociodemographic characteristics and motivations of active bloggers as well as on strategies of presenting oneself, dealing with social relationships and using the blogosphere as a source of information. These are found to be partly dependent on bloggers’ age, partly on the experience with the Weblog format. In general, the majority of bloggers uses them to journal episodes and events of their private life, while keeping contact with other readers and authors through comments and (to a lesser extent) a blogroll.

I really like the paper, but I’d say that it’s really two-in-one: the first is probably the best theorising work on weblogs I’ve seen so far, the second has a very interesting results complementing other blog studies.

The main reason I see it as two papers: I don’t see how the survey illustrates the model. I find the strength of Jan’t model in articulating dynamic relations between different aspects of blogging practices, as well as connections between micro-level “specific blogging episodes” and forming of macro-level rules and relations – I do not see how those things are illustrated by the survey (Jan, may be I miss what is there – then it should be more articulate).

Interesting finding (see also highlights by Philipp Young): choices of what to blog about differ by age (teenage and older bloggers), while use of comments, blogrolls and RSS differ by the time spent blogging (less than 6 months/more than 6 months). The second one suggests the change of blogging practices over time (corresponds to similar finding in my BlogTalk paper (.pdf), other studies and subjective feelings).

I’m not sure how far one-to-one generalisations of specific blogging practices (e.g. contents or weblog posts) into broader categories (information, identity and relationship management) would hold. For example, if we talk about identity management: (IMHO) in the blogosphere your identity is formed as much by linking to others as by the contents of your weblog. This comes back to the whole discussion on artefacts and practices (e.g. archaeology and ethnography in weblog research, but I should write about it properly).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/04/12.html#a1762; comments are here.

• Lessons in Community-Building: An Inquiry into Role of Weblogs in Online Communities
• Paper: Blending blogging into an academic text
• Research on differences in technology uses (for collaboration) inside companies vs. internet uses

Anjo is moving further in developing a blog-friendly version of tOKo (related to all our earlier work on weblog communities, conversations and topics):

A little bit of progress on the open source version of tOKo (and the like), and in particular making it suitable for bloggers.

The first problem is turning a (your?) blog into a corpus. tOKo is pretty flexible as to what a corpus looks like, but the process must be automated. Jack Vinson and Ton Zijlstra provided great help by converting their blogs to a Movable Type export file and making the result available. Therefore, tOKo now contains a “Create corpus from Movable Type” function. The nice thing is that several blogging platforms provide Movable Type (MT) export. For example, in TypePad (which I use) a MT file can be generated from the web interface. Moreover, an MT file contains all information, including comments and trackbacks.

I’m getting into research fun anticipation – getting hold of comments next to post text would be such a great thing for the analysis :)

And, if want to help to develop the tool you can contribute your blog archives in Movable Type format (WPexport could be handy for WordPress users). This especially makes sense if you feel belonging to KM bloggers community (paper) – or, as Anjo puts it:

If you have linked to Jack, Ton, Lilia or myself in the past, this would be particularly interesting (also if you can only export to Movable Type). The only disadvantage of making your weblog available is that I might ask you to alpha-test tOKo :-).

My email address is: anjo science uva nl (one at, two dots).

You get a bit more insight about this work from Ton’s impressions on the work in progress and Anjo’s visualisations (1, 2, 3, 4).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/04/11.html#a1761; comments are here.

• My definitions of a weblog
• A Brief Overview of the Linguistic Attributes of the Blogosphere
• Papers of WWW2004 workshop on the weblogging ecosystem

Anjo is documenting more experimentation with mapping KM bloggers community (check paper for the background) – this time going beyond links into text analysis.

• Passion and profession – some explanations on statistics used
• Passion and profession 2 – visualisation with clusters

I think that we are up to something interesting with both, linking/discovery algorithm and text analysis of Anjo. Promise to blog more on that – also explaining things behind the paper (so happy to be back…).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/10/10.html#a1691; comments are here.

• Topics and terms (categorisations and text analysis) for weblog conversations
• Me, speaking on researching blogs and blogging research, Amsterdam, 21 June
• Results of Seb’s

Long promised – our (still work in progress) with Stephanie Hendrick and Anjo Anjewierden :

Abstract. 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.

More:

• longer abstract and authors info
• presentation (.ppt)
• paper (.pdf)
• this is an update on the earlier paper (In search for a virtual settlement: An exploration of weblog community boundaries); introductory section is very similar, but the rest is pretty new)

I’m running right now, but will add a few links a bit later one as well as talk about most interesting things we found last weeks in the blog (in case you are too lazy to read the paper).

Tags: aoir, aoir6

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/10/07.html#a1686; comments are here.

• BlogTalk 2.0: Panel 2 – blogging beyond webpublishing
• Slow reading and knowing questions
• Weblog research in Dortmund University and problems with weblog research

Usually Stephanie is the first to blog pictures like this one from our work on weblog communities, but this time I couldn’t resist :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/09/29.html#a1680; comments are here.

• Time in blogging: writers time and readers time
• Apprenticeship in weblog networks
• Blogademia – weblog research blog by Scott Nowson

I was thinking of commenting on the unfolding discussion on link love since BlogHer, but couldn’t find time to write it up properly (which for me required going through the fast-growing number of posts). Don’t think I’ll do it properly now, but given our work was referenced a couple of times I feel responsible enough to do it…

I’m in the Feedster top 500 (as some friends nicely point out). So what?

• I don’t have people knocking on my door asking me to speak at conferences or wanting to place ads in my weblog – being in the list doesn’t mean that you are in the inner circle (I suspect that A-list is not something defined by whatever top-X list anyway).
• I do not see any personal value of being in this list or using it to find others. The only thing it brings is egosmiling – ha, I’m in the list – me having some fan registering the fact. If I disappear from it tomorrow I’d smile again and go on.

These are my personal indicators that lists of popular blogs do not work.

A few things could work. Smart combinations of blog metrics, or better visualizations of conversation clouds because I guess we are more interested in finding the cloudmakers and connecting with them…

I guess there is already some understanding in the community of what is needed. Probably something like those visualizations.

Available for you and me. For our own weblogs or topics we are interested, not only for those researchers choose to study. Trusted and clickable.

From what to how

I’m not sure that the problem is in the lack of algorithms. At least those that come from research are published. I think it’s pretty much about the teasing data.

It’s not enough to come up with a great formula. You have to test it – to see what comes out, to try it on different data sets, to implement it as a tool, to make tools open for a public, to make sure all these scales…

But it starts with the data. And the data is not public.

I can not speak for others, but I can talk about problems we have with the data needed for our research (which addresses some of the “link love” aspects). What we need to develop algorithms and tools are pretty simple: blog content in “full-text RSS quality” via APIs…

We tried many of the current blog indexing tools: no luck (those that are pretty close to what we need, BlogPulse, Technorati and Bloglines are either consider the data they collect commercial or do not have APIs to access it). As a results Anjo is working on weblog spider instead of community discovery algorithm.

I know other researchers working on weblog spidering instead of working on algorithms to process and visualise weblog data. I wonder how many other people out there who would play with the data if it would be accessible without any threshold. I believe there are many.

I was very sad to hear last week that upflux didn’t gain much support from players in the blog indexing market. I wonder if open access to weblog data is a “nice to have, but never real” dream. And I wonder if Mary’s effort will turn it into reality…

Btw, are there any Technorati tags for this conversation?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/08/22.html#a1641; comments are here.

• An argumentation analysis of weblog conversations
• Researching blogs and blogging research: synergies of colliding worlds
• AOIR: my selection of papers