Weblogs circulating information

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Weblogscirculating information

• COMM 2P26 - Feb 10th 2009

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(No Transcript)
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What is a Weblog (Blog)?

• a web site that is a "log of the Web
• weblog (Jorn Barger,1997)

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Characteristics

• Personal editorship
• Hyperlinked post structure
• Frequent updates, displayed in reverse
  chronological order
• Free, public access to the content
• Archival
• (Seb Paquet 2002)

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History of Blogs

• One of the most significant things that happened
  with the growth of the weblog community is that
  weblogs became a conversational medium. Many
  editors would use their weblog to discuss things
  that had been said by another editor, using links
  to enable readers to follow threads. Arbitrary
  numbers of people could participate in such
  conversations, provided they had their own
  weblog. Sébastien Paquet

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History

• A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a
  human guide who you get to know. There are many
  guides to choose from, each develops an audience,
  and there's also comraderie and politics between
  the people who run weblogs, they point to each
  other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops,
  etc.
• David Winer http//www.scripting.com/

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Early Years

• The first weblog was Tim Berners-Lee's "What's
  New?" page at http//info.cern.ch
• The second weblog was Marc Andreessen's "What's
  New?" page - mid-1996.
• 1996-1997 Early weblogs include
• Dave Winer's Scripting News
• Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom
• Cameron Barrett's CamWorld
• Rob Malda's Slashdot

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Early Content

• The content of early weblogs
• mix of links and commentary
• built followings because they provided a unique
  selection of fresh content that appealed to a
  segment of the online population and because of
  their personal flavour.
• The personal nature of early weblogs is captured
  in Rob Malda's comment, "Slashdot got successful
  largely because I was my target audience. I
  wasn't trying to make a site for someone else, I
  was creating the site that I wanted to read."

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Growth

• weblogs became a conversational medium
• editors would use their weblog to discuss things
  that had been said by another editor, using links
  to enable readers to follow threads.
• Arbitrary numbers of people could participate in
  such conversations, provided they had their own
  weblog
• as webloggers started reading other people's
  weblogs, a practice called blogrolling became
  widespread.

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Growth

• Blogrolling
• "The section of a weblog that lists the sites
  that the blogger reads on a regular basis. This
  is usually located on the side of a blogger's
  frontpage, or on a separate page linked off of
  the frontpage." (The Microcontent News glossary
  )
• these link lists make the social connections that
  exist among webloggers explicit .

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The Blogosphere
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How many?
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Uses of Blogs

• Personal knowledge management
• Conversation
• Social networking
• Information routing

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Types of Blogs

• Personal
• Business
• Schools
• Non-Profits
• Politics
• Military
• Private
• Sports
• How-to, tips review
• http//en.wordpress.com/types-of-blogs/

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Types of Posts

• Definition Post
• Resource Post
• Tutorial Post
• Story Post
• Opinion Post
• http//www.pureblogging.com/2007/09/10/the-5-types
  -of-blog-posts-that-experts-write/

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Weblogs evolve quickly

• The weblog community is decentralized
• There is a large and diverse population of users
• Many editors of weblogs are also web software
  developers
• A philosophy of sharing generally prevails in the
  weblog community

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Ways of blogging

• Moblogging
• Photoblogging
• VideoBlogging
• Audioblogging

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moblogging
http//moblog.net/home/
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videoblogging
http//www.vobbo.com/
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audio blogging
http//www.audioblog.com/
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(Unintended) consequences of blogging

• Defamation or Liability
• Employment
• Political Dangers
• Therapeutic benefits
• Personal Safety

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Kathy Sierra Case

• Programming Instructor, game developer blogger
• Threatening blog posts emails plus death
  threats
• a false account of her career was posted online,
  along with her address and Social Security number
• Cancelled public appearances
• More here
• http//www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?
  blogid19entry_id14783

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Bloggers Code of Conduct

• Take responsibility not just for your own words,
  but for the comments you allow on your blog.
• Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
• Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
• Ignore the trolls.
• Take the conversation offline, and talk directly,
  or find an intermediary who can do so.
• If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell
  them so.
• Don't say anything online that you wouldn't say
  in person.
• (Tim OReilly)

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Does Gender Matter?Examining Conversationsin
the Blogosphere

• Tracy L.M. Kennedy
• Sociology
• University of Toronto
• Joanna S. Robinson
• Communications, Popular Culture Film
• Brock University
• Kaye Trammell
• Mass Communication
• Louisiana State University

AoIR Presentation October 2005
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Blogs Gender in the Blogosphere

• Significant increase in blog creation and
  readership in particular in recent years (US).
• Blog readership increased by 58 in 2004
• Growth in blog readership among women, minorities
  and the 30 to 49 age group.
• (PEW Internet American Life 2005)
• Who are the bloggers?
• PEW says 57 of blog creators are Male
• Perseus says 56 of blog creators are Female

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Questions

• Do women and men differ in the way they
  communicate/comment on blogs?
• How is gender expressed in blog comments?
• Do gendered communication styles found in other
  CMC research apply to blog commenting?
• What are the implications of these communication
  differences?

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Why Study this?

• Understanding how communication styles differ
  allows us to interact more constructively and
  insightfully with others whose ways of
  communication may differ from our own (Wood
  1997 19).
• Effective participation in contemporary life
  demands that we understand varied individuals
  with whom we interact and that we cultivate a
  range of communication skills in ourselves
  (Wood 1997 19).
• In the blogosphere, everyone has an equal
  opportunity to speak, but not everyone has an
  equal opportunity to be heard. (Ratcliff 2005)

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Why Study this?

• What do communication differences mean in terms
  of community building and political advocacy?
• If people want to be heard, do they need to talk
  in a certain way? (ie political discussions
  masculine discourse)
• Where are the women? debate - Clancy Ratcliff
  (2005)
• It begins with a woman who posts about being
  ignored most of the time by male, A-list bloggers
  whose weblogs she had linked to and on which she
  had left comments. She felt that her posts about
  politics were not being taken seriously by the
  men, and the only time they linked to her was
  when she wrote about sex.

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Gender CMC

• Gendered communication processes are well
  researched
• For example Hall, 1996 Gurak, 1997
  Herring,1992 1993 1996 1998 2003 to name a
  few
• We utilized these gendered characteristics from
  existing research to examine communication
  patterns in the comments on blogs

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Operationalizing Gendered Communication
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Data Collection

• blogrolling.com Hot 500
• http//hot.blogrolling.com/
• First 10 male and female blogs that were single
  authored with comments
• Blog posts and comments downloaded
• First 5 comments for the first 5 posts coded into
  categories gender of commenter also recorded
• Comments could have more then one characteristic
  (ie assertive and expressive)
• Data imported into SPSS for analysis

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Limitations

• Top 500 represent the most popular and most
  linked blogs (A-list bloggers), and not other
  blogs with a smaller readership not necessarily
  generalizable to all blogs
• Coding the comments can be subjective people
  may read into the comments differently than
  others
• People may be deceptive about their identity
  gender in their comments
• Didnt look at trackbacks
• Its not just about gender need to think about
  socio-cultural contexts race ethnicity,
  class, sexuality etc
• Need to be cautious about essentializing and
  categorizing behaviours

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Female Blogs Sampled
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Male Blogs Sampled
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Comments on Sampling

• Hard to find women A-listers
• Tried technorati, blogrolling and other and
  finally had to go with the top 500
• Mens had more group blogs then women
• The types of blogs that women and men have are
  different (not surprising) (See Herring et al
  2004)
• Womens blogs more diary styles, whereas mens
  blogs seem to be more information, political etc

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Types of Blog posts

• Diary
• Politics
• Open Thread
• Rant/Opinion
• Creative/Art/Poems
• Popular Culture
• Information/Links
• News
• Photos

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Overview of Findings

• Crosstabs testing for significance
• Total comments coded n404
• 49 of comments on all blogs were made by males
• 35 of comments on all blogs were made by females
• 16 of comments on all blogs ambiguous/unknown

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Comparing Women Men and the kinds of comments
they maket-test comparing means
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What does it all mean?

• Peoples blog comments are gendered
• Consistent with Herring (2000), there is a
  tendency for Internet users to display features
  of culturally-learned gender styles in their
  typed messages
• Gender is socially constructed, expressed and
  reproduced through language in weblogs comments

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Implications?

• Linguist Robin Lakoff was one of the earliest to
  claim that womens language is powerless
  beginning in 1973 she tried to explain that
  certain language forms used primarily by women
  kept them from being taken as credible speakers
  (Bate 1992 98).
• Are women taken seriously?
• Might address the where are the women? question
• Women are there, they are just not always heard,
  or not perceived as an important contribution to
  the discussion (about certain topics
  political.)
• Where do we go from here?

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Questions to consider for future research

• How do the types of comments made by women and
  men affect the communication process? Whose
  voices are privileged?
• Can changes be observed in gendered patterns in
  CMC over time?
• Could there be an increase in participants in CMC
  using a combination of styles or less distinctly
  gendered styles?
• What are the potential implications of changes,
  or lack of changes over time (as the case may
  be)?
• interviews to get a sense of how people read
  and interpret comments, and what their response
  might be or what they might NOT respond
• Have other researchers conduct similar research
  to reduce the subjective nature of interpreting
  comments

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Blog Work

• Find examples of and comment on a
• Moblog Photoblog VideoBlog Audioblog
• Find two corporate blogs comment, compare
  contrast. How effective or successful do you
  think these two examples are?
• Pick a students blog
• comment on a post
• blog about it on your blog
• talk about the style or tone of the blog
• Link to the blog post using trackback