Investment and Attention in the Weblog Community

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Investment and Attention in the Weblog Community

• Advisor Hsin-Hsi Chen
• Speaker Sheng-Chung Yen

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Agenda

• Introduction
• Goals
• Related Work
• Weblog Structure
• Design and Methodology
• Result
• Conclusion
• References

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Introduction

• The weblog medium has grown out, the social and
  behavioral aspects of this emerging practice
  represent a large shift towards a new form of
  interaction.
• What distinguished weblogging from previous web
  media is the extent to which it is social.

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Goals

• This paper seeks to understand the social
  implications of hypertext links within the
  community, both from a systemic view of the
  entire network and also form the perspective of
  individual authors.

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Related Work

• Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)
• Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
• Its focus is social science research on
  computer-mediated communication via the Internet,
  the World Wide Web, and wireless technologies. 2

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Weblog Structure

• Bloggers hypertext links
• Static links a form of readership.
• Dynamic links implying discourse or interaction
  around a particular topic.
• They refer to weblog interconnections as a
  Readership Network.

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Design and Methodology(1/2)

• Sample
• Directories
• Spidering
• Application
• Ping server ex Blo.gs
• Aggregator
• Corpus collection
• Selecting English blogs

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Design and Methodology(2/2)

• Survey
• This survey will take advantage
• Random sample
• Self-selected sample
• Weblog Use
• of other sites read.
• of posts per week.
• of comments made on other weblogs.
• The total time invested during an average week.
• Links
• Social categories (weblog, weblog post, personal
  homepage)
• The type of relationship the author had with the
  alter friend, family, acquaintance, or dont
  know them personally.
• When they had last read the site?
• When they had last posted a comment on it?
• When they had met the author in person?

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Result

• During the months of May and June 2005.
• Over the 37 day period, over 15 million links
  were extracted from about 1 million weblogs.

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Result
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Result
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Result
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Result

• It is clear that there is a strong relationship
  between the frequency of posting and a weblogs
  in-degree, and more-so for dynamic links than
  static.

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Result

• Survey
• Email to the random sample subjects.
• Publicized on a number of popular weblogs.
• Sample
• Random
• LiveJournal
• Self-selected
• Sex 0 ? male, 1 ? female
• Education 0 ? less than High School, 6 ? a
  graduate degree.

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Result
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Result
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Result

• The more popular weblogs inspire their authors to
  invest more time, or the invested time could be
  rewarded with larger audiences and more frequent
  comments.

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Result
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Result
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Result
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Conclusion

• The observation of a strong relationship between
  investment in the weblog and payoff in terms of
  audience size and feedback.
• As I anticipated, these measures of investment
  were shown to correlate very strongly with
  measures of attention and audience size.
• These data show that the weblog community rewards
  the author who puts time into their work, and
  that the length of ones blogging history does
  not solely determine their future audience.

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References

• 1 C. Marlow, Investment and attention in the
  weblog community, Proceedings of the AAAI Spring
  Symposium on Computational Approaches to
  Analyzing Weblogs, 2006.
• 2 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication,
  http//jcmc.indiana.edu/index.html.