CONVERSATION AUTHORITIES AMONG POPULAR WINE BLOGS (accepted EuroChrie congress 2010, Amsterdam)

8/9/2019 CONVERSATION AUTHORITIES AMONG POPULAR WINE BLOGS (accepted EuroChrie congress 2010, Amsterdam)

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CONVERSATION AUTHORITIES AMONG POPULAR WINE BLOGS

Kostas V. ZafiropoulosUniversity of Macedonia

Thessaloniki, Greece

e-mail: [email protected]

Vasiliki G.VranaTechnological Education Institute of Serres

Serres, Greecee-mail: [email protected]

and

Dimitrios M. VagianosUniversity of Macedonia

Thessaloniki, Greecee-mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACT

Blogging in the wine industry is widespread. There are blogs sharing the passion for wine, blogsproviding wine news, blogs about the review and consumption of wine, blogs that rate wine, wineries,marketers and retailers blogs, wine travel blogs and blogs that deal with the business of wine. The objective ofthe present paper is to establish the Top 100 Wine Blogs and to locate the central groups of wine-bloggers, usingthe Wine Blog Searching Engine. Central groups of blogs serve as focal conversational points where probablythe interesting conversation and information provision is taking place. Next, the paper describes features of

these blogs. It attempts in this way to investigate what are the characteristics that distinguish these blogs andmake them to be appreciated and be considered worth visiting.

Key Words: top wine blogs, incoming links, central blog groups, multidimensional scaling, hierarchical clusteranalysis, blog characteristics

INTRODUCTION

The recent explosion of social networking sites, consumer generated content and web applications thatfacilitate content and media syndication have tremendous impact on the profile, expectations and decisionmaking behaviour of Internet users, on the way consumers use the Internet and on e-business model thatbusinesses need to develop and/or adapt (Sigala, 2007). Globally, the wine industry attracts much attentionalthough it is not a growth industry: world wine production and consumption have been declining slightly over

the past two decades. But to millions of investors and hundreds of millions of consumers, wine industryprovides a far more fascinating product than its shares of global expenditure or GDP might suggest (Anderson etal., 2001).

Blogs are an innovation in personal publishing and in the last few years they are growing in popularityand have turned into a key part of todays online culture (Hsu & Lin, 2008; Marlow, 2004). Blogging in thewine industry is very widespread and several different types of wine blogs with different purposes exist. Yarrow(2010) in the complete list of wine blogs recorded 865 wine blogs. According to Thach (2010) nine majortypes of wine blogs exist: review of wines, wine and food, wine education, Winemaking & Viticulture,Specific Region, Wine & Culture, Winery Blog ,Wine Business and Other. Blogs are not onlyemployed in personal environments but also in organizations and enterprises (Kolbitsch & Maueur, 2006) and asthey are growing in popularity, businesses and organizations are looking for ways to exploit them. An

organizational or corporate blog is a means of communication between organization/corporate and its public andenables industry to interact meaningfully with their potential customers (Jch & Stobbe, 2005; Kosonen et al.,2007; Lu & Hsiao, 2007). In this vein, some wineries have already established their own blogs. Stormhoek


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Vineyards, a small winery in South African tripled its sales in 2 years by using a wiki and blogs to create groupsfor wine tasting parties (Lai &Turban, 2008). Blogs have the power of the impartial information and the e-word-of-mouth that is diffusing online like a virus (Sigala, 2007). This has important implications in the wineindustry, as blog reviews of wine influence the buying patterns and sell the product or not. Thach (2010, p.2)mentioned Wine blogs are not monitored and there are no official guidelines or rules regarding what can bepublished therefore, there are many diverse opinions about wines and wine brands. Because of this some

bloggers may write either positive or negative reviews about wine that can help or hinder wine sales.Additionally to this theres a recent tendency of new forms of tourism, as wine tourism, attracted from typicalproducts and alimentary and culinary traditions (Di Gregorio & Licari, 2006). This sort of touristic supplystarting from the product involves positive effects not only for the production, but for the grapes production,distilleries, information agencies, and last but not least, restaurants and food sector in general (Di Gregorio &Licari, 2006, p.5). As information is the lifeblood of tourism, the use and diffusion of Web 2.0 technologieshave a substantial impact on both tourism demand and supply (Sigala 2009, p.221). The discussions,information exchange and collaboration taking place in wine blogs provide value for wine tourists tripplanning.

By definition, blogs link to other sources of information usually to other blogs. Barger (1997) who firstused the term weblog, defined blog as a web page where a blogger logs all the other web pages he finds

interesting. Drezner & Farrell (2004, p. 5) defined weblogs as A web page with minimal to no externalediting, providing on-line commentary, periodically updated and presented in reverse chronological order, withhyperlinks to other online sources. Blogs depend upon hyperlinks not only to boost attention to their own blog,but to also ensure that users can be quickly led to relevant information (Kenix, 2009). Blogging tools provideappropriate features for managing blog interactivity and promoting the creation of social networks amongbloggers (Du & Wagner, 2006). Blogrolls, trackback links and comments can hint at a bloggers connections(Su et al., 2005). Sigala (2008) mentioned, blogs create and maintain strong online communities through theirsocial ties tools such as blogrolls, permalinks, comments and trackbacks. Analysing blogrolls is a good way tomap the network as they are used by bloggers to self identify their close connections (Efimova et al., 2005).

In the present paper, The Wine Blog Search Engine", and records the Top 100 Wine Blogs andinvestigates conversational patterns between bloggers are used. Wine blog ratings are standardized composite

scores based on multiple relative link popularity rankings from three top search engines and Technorati, as wellas Google page rank scores. The paper studies incoming links between bloggers through blogrolls. Ablogroll is a list of blogs that many bloggers maintain. The blogroll occupies a permanent position on theblogs home page and is the list of blogs that the blogger frequently reads or especially admires and thus offerslinks to these blogs. Blogrolls evolved early in the development of blogs and serve as a navigation tool for blogreaders to find other blogs with similar interests (Marlow, 2004). Commenting on this Drezner & Farell (2004,p.7) wrote: Blogrolls provide an excellent means of situating a bloggers interests and preferences within theblogosphere. Bloggers are likely to use their blogrolls to link other blogs that have shared interests. Blogrollsare also great traffic driving tools. With each blogroll that your blog is listed on, comes the possibility thatreaders of that blog will click on your link and visit your blog (http://weblogs.about.com

/od/partsofablog/qt/WhatIsaBlogroll.htm). Albrecht et al. (2007, p. 506) referred to this form of interactivitybetween blogs as connectedness of weblogs.

POWER AND INFLUENCE OF BLOGS

One of the key characteristics of Web 2.0 is the idea of User Generated Content. Users have the abilityto create their own content, rather than passively consume whatever is created for them by others (Zappen et al.2008). Blogs are low-threshold tools for Internet users to personalise and actualise content and informationonline and to present their views to a broad audience and are also ideal for experts to broadcast their expertise toa large audience (Wagner & Bolloju, 2005). Pedley (2005, p.95) mentioned A major attraction of weblogs istheir relative ease of construction/updating and the lack of the need or any special skills in web design or ofHTML coding and Jackson (2006, p. 294) wrote that with blogs even technophobes could get online.Rosenbloom (2004) claimed a blogger only needs a computer, internet access and an opinion. However, itneeds effort to maintain an active blog. Activity depends on two parameters: the blogger, who needs to updatethe content regularly, and the readers who need to visit and interact often with the blog. It is not uncommon that

blogs are abandoned soon after their creation (Hsu & Lin, 2008).


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Blogs help self-expression and self-empowerment, and therefore have become a major source ofinformation and communication for Internet users and have the power to engage people in collaborative activity,knowledge sharing, reflection and debate (Blood, 2002; Efimova et al., 2005; Punie & Cabrera, 2005; Williams& Jacobs, 2004). Moreover, they are often perceived as powerful because they allow millions of people to easilypublish and share their ideas, and millions more to read and respond (www.technorati.com) and as a good wayof circulating new ideas (Baker & Green, 2005).

Bloggers provide more authentic information, gained through personal experience (Sharda & Ponnada,2007) and trust one another. Kozinets (2002) wrote on this, that people, who interact in spaces like blogs over along period of time, trust the opinions of the other users and take them into consideration when making apurchase decision. There are certain product categories on the web which require more information for people tomake a purchase ( Leskovec , 2007). Tourism products, fit this category as they can hardly be evaluated prior totheir consumption (Rabanser & Ricci, 2005) and depend on accurate and reliable information (Kaldis et al.,2003) thus elevating the importance of interpersonal influence (Lewis & Chambers 2000). Wine also, fits thiscategory suggesting wine blogs may be useful for some consumers to make wine selections (Thach, 2010).It is human nature to be more interested in what a friend buys than what an anonymous person buys, to be morelikely to trust their opinion, and to be more influenced by their actions. As one would expect our friends are alsoacquainted with our needs and tastes, and can make appropriate recommendations ( Leskovec , 2007 p.3) Thus,

e-word-of-mouth becomes the most important information source (Litvin et al., 2008) and therefore Internetbased recommendations are helpful in wine buying decision (Thach, 2010) and for travel planning (Akehurst,2009; Litvin et al., 2008). ONeill et al. (2002) studied wine tourism in Australia, and found that visitorsrecommendations boost wine sales when vacationing opinion leaders told their experiences.

BLOGS AS SOCIAL NETWORKS

Social networks consist of people connected through various social relationships or exchanges (Herringet al., 2005). Social network analysis (SNA) is a discipline of social science that seeks to explain socialphenomena through a structural interpretation of human interaction both as a theory and a methodology(Marlow, 2004 p.2). The goal of SNA is to identify who the key actors are and what positions and actions arelikely to take (Krackhardt, 1996, p.161). According to Balancieri et al. (2007) SNA is rooted in the concepts ofnodes and connections. Nodes, are the social actors and can be persons, groups, organizations, nations,

communities, offices, blogs and so on and connections refer to channels of communication, (Balancieri et al.,2007; Martino & Spoto, 2006). Blogs facilitate members social interactions and provide conversation (Nardiet al., 2004; Herring et al., 2005) and blog communities emerge from interlinking between them (Efimova &Hendrick, 2005; Efimova et al., 2005). According to Chin & Chignell (2007) Blogs are a form of socialhypertext, functioning as a one-to-one mapping between a network of web pages and a network of people,which can be represented as a social network and from which communities can emerge.

A Social Network can be represented in three ways: the first one is by giving a simple list of all theelements taken from the set of social actors, and the list of the pairs of elements that are linked by a socialrelationship of some kind. The second has a form of matrix. If two social actors I and J have a relation then 1 isplaced at the cell (i,j), otherwise 0 is placed in this cell. Finally, a description of a Social Network may have aform of a graph where social actors can be represented by nodes, and the connections with each other can be

represented by edges between these node (Marlow, 2004; Martino & Spoto, 2006).

A-LIST BLOGS

There are millions of individual blogs, but within any community, only a few blogs attract a largereadership (Wagner & Bolloju, 2005). The vast majority of blogs are probably only read by family and friends,there are only a few elite blogs which are read by comparably large numbers wrote Jackson (2006, p.295).Herring et al. (2004) also claimed that the most discussions of the blogosphere focus on an elite minority ofblogs. These blogs are the most known and regularly linked by others. According to Trammell & Keshelashvili(2005, p. 968) their authors manage to create a persona, making themselves a celebrity among the communityof bloggers. These blogs are referred as "A-list". "A-list blogs are most widely read, cited in the mass media,and receive the most inbound links from other blogs. The small group of A-list bloggers has the largestinfluence on the publics perception of blogging because of their high profile (Trammell & Keshelashvili,

2005). The A-list appears at the core of most characterizations of the blogosphere wrote Herring et al. (2005).


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Many bloggers desire a wide readership; and the most reliable way to gain traffic to their blog isthrough a link on another weblog (Blood, 2002). Drezner & Farrell (2004, p.7) mentioned when one blog linksto another, the readers of the former blog are more likely to read the latter after having clicked on a hyperlinkthan they would have been otherwise. If they like what they read, they may even become regular readers of thesecond blog. In that way blogs with large numbers of incoming links offer both a means of filtering interestingblog posts from less interesting ones, and a focal point at which bloggers with interesting posts, and potential

readers of these posts can coordinate (Drezner & Farrell, 2004; p.13). Less prominent bloggers contact one ofthe large focal point blogs, to publicize their post when they have an interesting piece of information or pointof view. On the one hand this leads the readers to focal point blogs, as they know that they will find links tomany interesting stories, and on the other hand bloggers to send posts to focal point blogs as they know that

they are likely to find more readers. Based on this and the lognormal distribution of weblogs, a few eliteblogs can operate as both an information aggregator and as a summary statistic for the blogoshpere. Thesame was claimed by Jackson (2006, p.296) who wrote elite bloggers can act as a focal point encouraginginfluential visitors to congregate around them. These blogs can also be described as being Authority blogs in aSearch Engine Optimization sense because they can serve as a meaning of navigation economy. Users who arelooking for relevant information can be directed to these blogs, which are regarded favourable or important byother blogs, and economize both time and unnecessary information. On the other hand, practitioners andmarketers could locate these authority blog groups and find out about the interests of the users and nextapproaching them with information or commercial offerings.

This paper makes use of recent advances on the study of blogs conversational patterns and applies themto wine blogs. It uses a study framework firstly introduced in political blogging in then successfully applied intravellers blogs. The basic concept is that blogs are organized around central groups of blogs, which serve asfocal conversational points. Both, the Internet users and the bloggers distinguish these central blog groups andrefer directly to them either for economy of navigation or because they are considered authority blogs. Thepaper makes use of statistical procedures to locate central blog groups making use of the hyperlinks amongblogs. After locating these blog groups, the paper investigates the characteristics of these particular blogsattempting in this way to explain why these blogs are appreciated and considered authority blogs.

METHODOLOGYThis research uses the Wine Blog Search Engine", and records the Top 100 Wine Blogs. Links fromthe Blogrolls of these top blogs to other blogs of the list were recorded during March 2010. The reasoning forrecording incoming links from blogrolls to other blogs is to observe and record formal interconnections betweenblogs. These interconnections take the form of suggestions to potential users. Users may benefit from navigatingthrough incoming links and visit blogs that are considered familiar, important or relevant by other blogs. Thussuggested blogs are granted a certain degree of worth and value.

Incoming links are represented by a graph representing the social network of wine blogs. This networkis associated with a 100x100 binary non-symmetric adjacency matrix. In this matrix if blog I links to blog J then1 is placed at the cell (i,j), otherwise 0 is placed in this cell. The paper adopts a statistical approach for studyingnetworks, although other graph theoretic approaches also exist such as finding components or cliques. These

graph theoretic notions are used in the study of social networks to locate actors who interact with each other.The statistical approach followed in this paper, in particular scaling and clustering analysis, is the preferredmethod because the interest is to find groups of blogs with these properties: 1) within these groups the blogsneed not be interconnected but rather 2) they need to be linked by nearly a common set of blogs. In this sense,clustering algorithms applied on the original adjacency matrix are considered suitable for locating these groups.The paper adopts a method introduced by Vrana & Zafiropoulos (2010) for locating core travelers groups.Vrana & Zafiropoulos (2010) introduced a combination of social networking theory, multidimensional scalingand hierarchical cluster analysis to locate central or core blog groups by studying incoming links throughblogrolls. By finding such groups, one can explore how bloggers are organized and easily follow howconversation proceeds. It is important to locate such groups in order to see how wine blogs are organized, whichblogs are considered important and which are the characteristics that distinguish them from the rest of the blogs.

Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) is used in the analysis as a data reduction technique and also toquantify the original binary data. The method reproduces the original data and map them on a fewer dimensionsspace (namely two in this analysis) while the effort is to keep intact the distances among the original data on the


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new reproduced data. Stress is a measure of goodness of fit between distances of original data and distances ofthe reproduced data. Better fit is assumed when stress is close to zero. Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) usesthe quantified data from MDS to produce clusters of blogs with similar properties. Since the input is theincoming links, blogs in the same cluster are linked by nearly the same set of blogs. In this way the blogs in aformed cluster are regarded to be of the same family or have common characteristics, by blogs who link them.Some of the clusters that are produced by HCA, gather the largest number of incoming links. If this happens

then they should be considered as conversational focal points.

Figure 1

The network of the top 100 wine blogs.

Table 1

Clusters of top 100 wine list according to their incoming links.

Cluster Number ofblogs in

cluster

Mean numberof incoming

links

Std. Deviation ofnumber of incoming

links

0 81 4.36 3.44

1 6 16.33 2.73

2 8 16.75 4.06

3 3 33.33 3.06

4 1 40 -

5 1 49 -

FINDINGS

The network of the top 100 wine blogs is presented in Figure 1. Multidimensional Scaling (MSpresents very good fit with Stress=0.03), followed by Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) result to theformation of clusters of blogs regarding incoming links. To decide about the suitable number of clusters, thestudy uses a scree plot of the number of clusters against Wilks Lambdas. A six clusters solution seems to be themost appropriate. These clusters are described in Table 1.


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Cluster 0 contains 81 of the 100 blogs. These 81 blogs have only a small number of incoming links(mean=4.36), while there are five more clusters with only a few blogs varying from one to eight blogs withineach one. Blogs in these clusters gather large numbers of incoming links. Within the framework introduced inthis paper these five clusters should be considered as central while Cluster 0 should be left out of the analysis.Clusters 1 and 2 consists of 6 and 8 blogs respectively and have moderate mean values of incoming links, whilecluster 3 consists of only 3 blogs and in average has twice the volume of incoming links compared to clusters 1

or 2 (33.33). Both clusters 4 and cluster 5 consists of only one blog. These are the most popular two blogs interms of number of incoming links. Cluster 4 has 40 incoming links and cluster 5 has 49 incoming links.

Table 2 presents the names, the central slogans, year of blogs creation and region of origin for the fivesignificant clusters. One should notice that most bloggers are from USA with only one exception: spittoon.bizfrom England and acevola.blogspot.com maintained either from US or Italy. Wine has been a European productfor many centuries. Nowadays, more than three-quarters of the volume of world wine production, consumptionand trade involve Europe, and most of the rest involves just a handful of New World countries settled byEuropeans: California, Australia, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa, and Uruguay are beginning tochallenge that European dominance in international markets (Anderson et al., 2001). So it is interesting to noticethis contradiction. The majority of top blogs originate from USA. Also many blogs are established early in thedecade of 2000, which means that they are active since the early stages of blogging.

Table 3 presents the managerial characteristics of the five central clusters. Table 4 presents thecorrelation coefficients of these characteristics with cluster membership and number of incoming links for theblogs of the central clusters.

Mean rank within the top 100 list is high for the five clusters. Clusters 1 and 2 have mean ranks 22.67and 18.25 respectively; while cluster 3 mean rank is lower than 10. Clusters 1 and 2 coincide with the two topclusters in the list. From Table 4 it is obvious that rank is highly and significantly correlated with either clustermembership or number of incoming links. Top 100 listing is reproduced on the way blogs link to each other inthe sense that blogs that are higher in the hierarchy are also the most linked ones.

Only a few central blogs report that they have certificates or are members of associations. Clusters 1, 3and 4 are the most active ones. Awards are reported only from blogs of clusters 1, 2 and 3 while the two mostpopular blogs do not report any. Further, only few blogs of clusters 1 and 3 report some kind of sponsor of theirblog. Nearly all blogs contain advertisements. Clusters 1 and 2 are less active in advertising. Java et al. (2006)mentioned that according to Forster Researchs survey, 64% of the advertisers are interested in advertising onblogs. Advertisers have realized the potential of blogs in influencing buying decisions of their target audience.Often when a buyer is interested in purchasing a product, blogs offer free and frank customer reviews. These topWine blogs have taken advantage of this feature.

Blogs in central clusters also offer comments and impressions about wine trips and tourism. Only oneblog (catavino.net ) offer information about organizing a trip like Car Hire, Hotel and apartment bookings,

Coaches Cafes. One also blog (http://www.drvino.com/), offered opportunities to win a trip to Rioja the landof a thousand wines. Clusters 5, 3 and 2 are most active while only one third of blogs in cluster 1 offercomments on trips and the blog in cluster 4 does not. Some blogs in clusters 1, 2 and 3 sell goods related to winein general or products regarding the blog itself, such as wine, souvenirs, T-shirts.

Finally, the blogs in clusters 5 and 4 offer recommendations, while for the blogs in cluster 1 thepercentage reaches 50% and for blogs in clusters 2 and 3 the portion of those recommendations is about onethird. The two blogs in clusters 4 and 5 offer education in wine tasting etc. The proportion of blogs offeringeducation and training for the rest of the clusters is very low, and no blog in cluster 2 offers such a training. InTable 4 it is shown that correlation of offering education with cluster membership and number of incoming linksis high and statistically significant. Education offering tends to be a characteristic of the most popular wineblogs.


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Table 2

Blogs in the central clusters.

Cluster Name SloganRegion of

origin Date since

1 1winedude.comSerious wine talk. fornot so serious drinker Philadelphia

1 californiawinehikes.com/winehiker

The official blog ofcaliforniawinehikes.com(guided hikes, winetasting, fine drinks andaccommodations in theCalifornia winecountry) Philadelphia 2005

1 wannabewino.comwannabe Wino Wineblog

NorthernVirginia. 2006

1 wineanorak.com/blogjamie Goodies' wineblog. Mainly wine.. 2001

1 winecast.net Wine cast 2004

1 spittoon.bizWe spit so you canswallow

Oxfordshire,England

2 acevola.blogspot.com On the wine trail in Italy US/Italy 2005

2 biggerthanyourhead.net

Bigger than your head.Eating and drinking: thegood the bad and therest of it Memphis 2006

2 brooklynguyloveswine.blogspot.com

Brooklynguy's Wineand Food Blog.Drinking, eating,enjoying in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn,NY 2006

2 catavino.net 2005

2 dirtysouthwine.comDirty south wine. Wineis meant to be crunk Atlanda 2008

2 goodwineunder20.blogspot.com Good wine under 20$ LA 2006

2 mcduffwine.blogspot.com

McDuff's Food & WineTrail. Taking a bite....

Three parts wine blog,one part food blog, plusa dash of music, cyclingand other culturalphenomena. Philadelphia 2007

2 rockssandfruit.blogspot.com

Rockss and Fruit.Thoughts on wine andwhatever strikes me atthe moment. But it'smostly about wine. NY 2007

3 drvino.comDr. Vino. Wine talk thatgoes down easy NY 2002

3 goodgrape.comGood grape. A winemanifesto Carmel, IN 2004


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3 thepour.blogs.nytimes.com

Diner's Journal Noteson eating drinking andcooking NY

4 fermentation.typepad.com

Tom WarksFermentation. The daily

wine blog. The blog setinside the world of winepublic relations - wherethe media the cultureand I mingle

SonomaValley 2004

5 vinography.com

VINOGRAPHY: a wineblog Wine and foodadventures in SanFrancisco and aroundthe world San Francisco 2004

Table 3

Operational and managerial characteristics of the central blog clusters.

clusters

1 2 3 4 5

Mean rank in top 100 list 22.67 18.25 8.67 1 2

Mean number of incoming links 16.33 16.75 33.33 40 49

Certificates or memberships % 33.33 0 33.33 100 0

Awards % 50 75 66.67 0 0

Sponsors % 16.17 0 33.33 100 0

Advertisements % 83.33 75 100 100 100

Comments on trips % 33.33 62.5 66.67 0 100

Sell goods% 16.17 25 33.33 0 0

Proposals or recomentations % 50 37.5 33.33 100 100

Offer education % 16.17 0 33.33 100 100

Table 4

Correlation coefficients of cluster characteristics with cluster membership and number of incoming links.

Cluster membership Number of incoming links

Rank .611(**) -.680(**)

Date since .165 -.482

Certificates or memberships -.070 .142

Awards .215 -.276

Sponsors -.227 .217

Advertisements -.177 .272Comments on trips -.192 .127


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Sell goods .051 -.221

Proposals recomendations -.202 .302

Offers education -.552(*) .530(*)

(*: p


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Documents

CONVERSATION AUTHORITIES AMONG POPULAR WINE BLOGS (accepted EuroChrie congress 2010, Amsterdam)