As I start my analysis of blog posts and comments – I can see I am going to need some method of organising and graphically representing the conversations. I have been looking at a couple of tools like NodeXL, but need to capture the sender/receiver relationship as well as the message/post/comment and the time/chronology.
Any thoughts?
I know that I just talked about re-focusing my research on the RQ and not getting sidetracked, but it is so hard when there are so many cool aspects of blogging to investigate. I have been reading more articles and I have gotten it into my head that I really need to conduct some kind of social network analysis (SNA) along with my ethnographic approach to the subject.
So it was quite exciting when I found an article in which the authors discuss merging SNA with text analysis to “support the understanding of specific conversational clouds [18] and the ‘cloudmakers’ behind them [20]” (Anjewierden and Efimova 2006). They go on to describe five dimensions of blog community characteristics (identifiers?) (1) document (posts, comments), (2) term (topics, key concepts), (3) person (community member), (4) link (blogroll, trackback, hyperlinks), and (5) time (post/comment publication date). They use these dimensions in tOKo analysis software.
I would like to try a similar analysis (although I would really like to include tagging as one of the dimensions to capture the ontology of the community as well). However, the software only recognises Movable Type blog exports and unfortunately I haven’t found an easy way to convert WordPress’s form of XML to MT. I also thought of using the dataset from the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) which includes 44 million posts from August to October 2008. It is also in XML, so I now need to decide how far I go down this path. Should a spend the time looking for (or developing – it is open source after all) a converter so I can do the analysis or do I get back on my original path? That’s the problem (good thing?) about research, once you know a little, you want to know more…
Anjewierden, A., & Efimova, L. (2006). Understanding Weblog Communities Through Digital Traces: A Framework, a Tool and an Example On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2006: OTM 2006 Workshops (Vol. 4277/2006, pp. 279-289). Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer.
I am a minimalist. I always say, “having something you can’t find is no different than not having it at all.” I like a clean space. Which makes it hard to explain my messy office (and flat, but that is another tale). Today I went into school to print some more articles and prep for summer term tutoring, but quickly discovered that I could not print to the network printers and everybody is still on holiday until tomorrow, so…. I decided it was a good time to clean my office. It is amazing what you find in the stacks and piles and drawers after only six months. I found an old ODT article declaring Obama’s intention to run fro US President. I found an old draft (covered in red pen) of my MBA dissertation. I found my tuition bill from last semester (oops). But most importantly I found a folder of neatly organised articles that were labelled, “Knowledge Management and Blogging”.
One of my biggest challenges as a new postgraduate is that I am never sure what direction I am (should be?) going and even worse I can never tell whether something is important for that direction. So I keep everything. I keep articles on SMEs, innovation, globalisation, project management, pretty much every topic I thought about researching. I tuck them away and forget about them. However something made me dust off that binder of articles and sit down in the middle of my mess and skim through the articles.
They were great. They reminded me that I am researching blogging because I am interested in the potential of blogging for organisational knowledge management. Sometimes I get so focussed (or sidetracked?) by an article that I forget the golden rule of research – stick to your research question. So if I want to understand what characteristics of blogging community behaviour support tacit knowledge transfer – why have a put aside my KM articles?! Well, they are back and I feel like I back in the right direction. But I haven’t tossed the other articles yet, just in case…
NOTE: This post started off in QuickPress, but grew too big so I switched to the normal editor. So I have found another benefit to the tool, it takes away the pressure to be verbose. I thought I just had a few things to write about tonight, but once I started, I realised I could say more if I wanted and I did. No pressure – I like it.
What are blogs made of? Well I have been reading more articles from the batch I printed out “last year”. They have been very thought provoking. I don’t know why I essentially stopped work on my thesis last month (or maybe because I did take a break). Whatever the reason, this topics is really interesting and from the stack of articles on blogging and community – I clearly am not the only one who thinks so.
This conference paper (Ali-Hasan and Adamic 2007) is on Social Network Analysis (SNA) of blogging sites. I haven’t read much on this topic because seemed to be way to info-science-y for me, However, I am quite visual, so I thought it might help me get a handle on the data I am collecting through this ethnographic study on blogging, so I have done a quick graph. It doesn’t look like much yet, but I think the problem in my convential use of the blogroll as the edges.
The paper discusses several topic near and dear to me, including community metrics such as cohesion, reciprocity, density, and degree of interaction. I think that using these models paired with the typology of tagging may create diagrams which more accurately represent “community”, but we’ll see…
Ali-Hasan, N., & Adamic, L. (2007). Expressing social relationships on the blog through links and comments. Paper presented at the Intl. Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Boulder, CO.
I was reading an interesting article today by Nitin Agarwal and Huan Liu (Agarwal and Liu 2008) on blogging research issues. It covers many issues on the difficulties of researching in the blogosphere, but there were three points I found particularly interesting (1) community discovery, (2) temporal patterns of influential bloggers, and (3) blogging as a social network.
Community discovery is really a tricky one. Typically researchers have used content analysis of posts and comments to characterise a blog’s community. The authors suggest a second method (which I haven’t read much about yet) developing and ultimately graphing hubs and authorities to define a blog community’s shape and bounds. Sort of a network analysis of citations and links using nodes and edges via blog leaders (influential bloggers). And yet another approach to identifying blogging communities is through the members roles. Studying the behaviours and motivations of leaders, participants, and lurkers uncovered different communities groupings depending on the role. All in all it still leaves me a bit confused about how to identify a blogging community, but at least I have some methods to investigate.
I had never thought about the role that influence has within blog community member interactions. The authors noted four types of “influentials” that came from their study (1) long-term, (2) average-term, (3) transient, and (4) burgeoning. This realisation that the type of influence members display within a community may be as important as other characteristics such as trust and quality was something that never occurred to me before. Of course it makes sense that influence (and the related concepts of trust, authority, competence, value, etc) would determine to some extent the motivations of both authors and readers, so I am not sure why this was so surprising to me – but it is definitely something to follow-up on.
Finally, I really like the authors’ analysis of blogs as social networks. In particular, the challenge of researching blogs which do not have the explicit FOAF (friends of a friend) aspect that social networking sites, such as Facebook, do. And how influence (I see a theme emerging) of authors spread via posts, links, and comments is much more relevant to blogging than it is in social networking sites.
If you are interested, I have included the reference to the article below. It is worth a read if you are researching in this area. An electronic version is available at, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1412737#.
Agarwal, N., & Liu, H. (2008). Blogosphere: research issues, tools, and applications. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 10(1), 18-31.
There are heaps of websites out there, but most of the time I can’t find what I am looking for. I read heaps of blogs, but I rarely find ones that I want to return to. But once in a while, you find a gem. The other day when I was looking up references in an article I hit on a bunch of conference proceedings on blogging community research. The conference papers have been great and one of the authors maintains a blog which I am really enjoying (see Mathemagenic).
The great thing about finding new blogs is that they are both new and familiar at the same time. I often worry (what me worry) that I have missed something big in my research. That I have either overlooked a study someone else did that is either exactly the same or completely contradicts what I am doing. So when I read research studies or blogs on blogging, I am generally a little wary. But this blog was really engaging and made me think about blogging as a researcher and a fellow blogger.
So whether you feel over or under whelmed by the information available on the web, I think we all appreciate it when find a gem. And if you blog – you get to tell the world about it – nice.
Today is the day. The first day of the rest of my (research) life. I am officially conducting research on blogging community motivations and behaviours through this blog. As part of my renewed commitment to the blog (yeah I have been pretty bad about blogging lately) I am pledging to blog at least 5 times per week – sort of a New Year’s Resolution that I plan to keep for more than 1 day.
So the blog for today is really about experimenting with engaging readers, so I thought I would try the new PollDaddy feature that was mentioned in another blog I read (see Impressions Scholarcast). Let me know how you like it.
Well I’d love to blame waiting for ethics approval for my long delays between posts, but I am afraid it is just laziness. When the weather is nice, I’d rather be at the beach and when it rains, I curl up in bed and read beach books. It is really the same story for the blog as it is for my thesis (getting nowhere fast), my job, and my life basically. Oh well, enough moaning.
The good news is that I do have ethics approval (see the new tab), so this is the beginning of my research study. Here are the highlights from my application. Enjoy!
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE AIMS:
The research study, which is the basis of a Master of Commerce thesis, is to identify the factors which contribute to the development of a blog-based community. Blogs are websites which display regular commentaries (‘posts’) in reverse-chronological order. They provide a community of readers with periodic new posts as well as an archive of posts which can be searched and easily retrieved. Blogs are written and maintained by one or more authors who write the posts, respond to comments and determine other blog characteristics such as design, linked websites (‘blogroll’), general blog themes, and individual post topics. The blogs in this study are public and open for reading and commenting by anyone with internet access.
In order to investigate the characteristics and behaviours of blogging communities a research methodology suited to the study to blogging must be used. This kind of exploratory study of blogging behaviours and motivations requires a methodology, which facilitates the examination of common practices within a blogging community. Established research methods for investigating the feelings, experiences, and perspectives of community members rely heavily on traditional organisational structures and modes of communication. When researching communities in a web environment, which have neither formal boundaries nor face-to-face (FTF) interactions, it is necessary to adapt extant research methods such as interviewing and observation.
Research on blogs and blogging communities is a relatively new field of study and only within the last few years have articles on blogs appeared in management journals. The earliest studies describe blogs as an “emerging form” of computer-mediated communication (CMC), date from the beginning of the decade (Riva, 2002, p. 581). Whilst early blog studies have been generally considered either an extension of CMC research (Blanchard, 2004; Gurak, Antonijevic, Johnson, Ratliff, & Reyman, 2004; Wei, 2004), or focussed on the mechanics of blogging (Riva, 2002; Rodzvilla, 2002), more recent literature has included a greater variety of topics and methods.
This research study uses applied ethnographic methods to study blog community members within a blog environment. The primary technique for interacting with participants is using blog-based interviewing or blogoviewing which is a one-to-many dialogue between the bloggers and readers. It uses not only the technical infrastructure and techniques of blogging, but also relies on the blogging community norms and behaviours. Blogoviews blend the traditional interviewing techniques with ethnographic principles, which are sympathetic with the sensibilities of a blogging community. Thus, blogoviews present a research method, which minimises the limitations of extant research practices, and yet leverages the benefits of the blogosphere environment. Participating in a blog-based dialogue provides not only the narrative of the discussion, but also facilitates observation of related blog communities, narrative and artefacts. Because of the separation of the researcher’s physical and virtual presence, the researcher is able to participate as both an internal member of the blog community and an external observer. Although, as with ethnography and all forms of qualitative research, the researcher’s perspective shapes and influences the interpretation of data generated.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE METHOD:
To generate data on blogging behaviours and motivations, this study will develop a blogging community by creating a research blog in which to engage and interact with participants. The blog, http://famartinniemi.wordpress.com/, will be authored by the primary researcher for this study. The topic of the blog and the theme of the posts are motivations and behaviours of members of blogging communities. The posts include the author’s personal thoughts and reflections on blogging as well as elicit comment and feedback of readers. Using the infrastructure, methods and social norms of the blogging community, the primary mechanisms for gathering data will be through blog-based interviewing and discussions as well as the analysis of linked websites, such as hyperlinks within the blog text, commenter blogs, and the blogroll. The blog will be updated regularly with commentary and questions in order to attract participation. The data collection will last for three months.
The study is open to anyone with internet access who wishes to participate within the research blog community. Participants will therefore self-select by visiting the blog website. The level of participation can vary great from reading a single post to regularly reading and commenting on posts. Participants are “recruited” in the same manner as other blogs attract a readership via links to the blog, search engine queries, and discussions in other social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Participants are encouraged through the behavioural norms and accepted practices of blogging to read posts, comment, and link to the blog. There will be no targeted recruitment using email or other personal appeals. Participation is completely voluntary and participants may withdraw at any time without notification by simply discontinuing visits to the website.
I think my first completely non-scientific finding on blogging is that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of time spent thinking about blogging and the amount of time actually blogging. Or at least that is what I am claiming as my excuse for letting 10 days pass between posts. I have been thinking about it heaps. I am in the process of getting ethics approval (I hope) for my research, so I have had to commit to a method and try to justify it. In the next few days, I will post my disclaimers and announce the official start of the research blog – although I am not sure what all of this has been – practice maybe?
I get asked the “so what?” question a lot. “So what is the point of researching blogging?” “So what does blogging have to do with Management?” “So what research questions to you proposed to answer with this blog?” So….
I would like to find out if blogging is an effective method of transferring tacit knowledge between people in different locations/time zones/organisational settings/etc. If it is – why? And why has it been difficult for organisations to adopt corporate blogs behind the firewall? I believe it has something to do with what motivates the millions of bloggers to join and participate in non-corporate blogs. There must be characteristics of blogging communities which encourage the free (gift economy) exchange of ideas that is not motivated by profit and not hindered by protectionism (job security, information hoarding, etc).
So there are dozens of questions I want answered, my question is… “so how?”
Just a couple of hours away from flying to Hamilton, well actually Auckland and taking a 2 hour shuttle bus to Hamilton, to attend the 12th Annual Waikato Management School Student Research Conference. I am presenting on the challenges of conducting research on blogs. There are heaps of other presentations too and I am really looking forward to hearing what other postgraduates in management are up to. Should be fun.
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