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Expressing Social Relationships on the Blog through Links and Comments
June 25, 2007 – San Jose, CA
2007 Summer Hard Problem Program (SHARP)
Noor Ali-HasanMicrosoft
Research conducted with Prof. Lada Adamic, University of Michigan School of Information
Introduction
• Keeping a blog continues to be a popular online activity
• Blogging is an extremely social activity– Bloggers receive and leave comments
about posts– Bloggers list other blogs on their blogrolls– Bloggers link to other blogs in their posts
(citations)
Blogs
blogroll
number of comments
blog posts
citations
Blogrolls
Blog Comments
Research Questions
• Do blog networks emerge due to blogging or do they represent real life social networks?
• Do blogs help facilitate the formation of new friendships or do they help preserve existing relationships in the real world?
• Do blog comments and blogroll links represent different levels of relationship intimacy?
Related Work
• McKenna et al. (2002) observed that close online relationships naturally progress to face-to-face interactions
• Nardi et al. (2004) found that many start blogging at the urging of friends and continue to blog to avoid disappointing their readers
Related Work
• Adamic and Glance (2005) analyzed network structure of political blogs during the 2004 U.S. Presidential election
• Herring et al. (2005) studied the interconnectedness of the blogosphere
Community Structure
Three Blog Communities
San Jose KuwaitBlogs
UAEBlogs
image source: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/
DFW Blogs
Data Collection Methods
• Collected blogroll links by hand• Used BlogPulse and Technorati for
in-post citations• Gathered comments manually over a
two week period just for Kuwait
Q8 UAE DFW
Number of Blogs 152 65 365
comment links
blogroll links
in-post links
664
131
325
143
2548
98
Link Type Overlap for Kuwait Blogs
Within-Community Blogroll and Citation Links
DFW UAE Kuwait
Reciprocity
Kuwait UAE DFW
post citations 19% 16% 26%
blogroll links 32% 43% 27%
comments 43% N/A N/A
Community Boundaries
DFW
UAE
Kuwait
Porosity of Community Boundaries
Kuwait UAE DFW
internal post citations received 79% 24% 16%
internal blogroll links given 47% 22% 9%
non-anonymous comments received from bloggers within community
42% N/A N/A
Online and Offline Relationships
Survey Methods
• Conducted online survey• Most notified via email• Kuwait Blogs and UAE Blogs blogged
about survey on central sites
Q8 UAE DFWNumber of Respondents 85 38 67Response Rate 63% 68% 23%
Motivation Behind Blogging
DFW Kuwait UAE
pe
rce
nta
ge
0.0
0.4
0.8
1.2
expressiononline journalinspired by friend's blogfind new friendsshare news w/ friends & family
Motivation Behind Blogging
I wish everybody would blog. It's such an easy way of knowing what's up in someone's life and what thoughts are on their mind, important or not. People often think, 'Oh, nobody'd want to read about /my/ boring life,' but really, sometimes just seeing the world from someone else's point of view can be fascinating.
DFW Blogs Survey Respondent
Intersection of Blogging and Offline Relationships
Q8 UAE DFW
Few or none of the comments received are left by people known offline
79% 81% 66%
Few or none of the comments left on other blogs are on blogs of people known offline
74% 94% 65%
Using Blogs to Sustain Real-Life Relationships with Non-Bloggers
Q8 UAE DFW
Few or none of the comments received are left by people who do not blog but whom they know offline
99% 94% 79%
Using Blogs to Maintain and Form Relationships
Median number of bloggers listed on blogroll and:
Q8 UAE DFW
Met in person 5 5 2Emailed 5 10 12IM’ed 6 2.5 2First met in person but now communicate with F2F, phone, email, or IM
5 4 3
Using Blogs to Maintain and Form RelationshipsMost of the Kuwaiti bloggers know
one another, either directly (friends/relatives) or indirectly (friends of friends, friend's relatives, etc.). If they don't know one another, then they don't remain strangers for long. […] I know of several people who used their blogs to make new friends in Kuwait.
Kuwait Blogs Survey Respondent
Using Blogs to Maintain and Form RelationshipsThe DFW Blogs community was an
incredible social network for me. I had recently moved back to the Dallas area when the group began. Through that group I was able to meet highly intelligent, talented, motivated, and creative people. We all had a common interest - blogs - but we were all so diverse. The group was amazing and I'm so thankful I was apart of it for so many years.
DFW Blogs Survey Respondent
Blogs in a National Crisis
Kuwait in January 2006
Image sources: http://www.kuwaitinfo.org.uk and http://news.bbc.co.uk
Visualization of Blog Post Topics
Blogs and Decentralized Information Sharing
• I'm a student in the United States and many of the blogs in Kuwait Blogs community keep me updated with what's going on in Kuwait and they are more informative and up to date than newspapers.
Kuwait Blogs Survey Respondent
Conclusions
• Blogs enable relationship formation• Blog relationships extend to other
communication methods and F2F• At this time, blogs are not used to
sustain real life relationships• All three communities show high
degrees of reciprocity and cohesion• Blogs used to make sense of a
national crisis
Questions?
For more information:
Noor Ali-HasanMicrosoft1065 La Avenida StreetMountain View, CA 94043
(650) 693-1925noor.ali-hasan@microsoft.comhttp://www.noor.bz/
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