Virtual communities and virtual blogging

I think my best blog posts are “written” in my head as I walk to school in the morning.  By the time I have had my coffee, read my email, and settle down to get some work done – poof – I can’t even remember what I was going to write about.  For the past couple of days, though, I have been thinking about a comment from my last post on the characteristics of blog communities – so I have been hiding from my blog because I don’t have a good response.  It is my own personal $64K question:

What are the traits of blog communities and are they a mechanism for knowledge conversion?

For the next few posts I am going to try and discuss this question, if not answer it.  So for today, I would like to talk about the time dimension of blog communities.  Blogs are kind of funny beasts compared to RL because members interact with each other asychronously, coming and going as they please.  Very different from RL conversations with members of a place-based community.  Imagine asking someone a question and then having them walk away and answer you three days later.  Sometimes blogs remind me of the little notes on the fridge for my family.  You can never count on them getting read when you need them to.  I have learned not to leave time-sensitive notes, because if they do get read, it is usually way too late.  I read (and write) blogs the same way.  I have a routine, as I drink my morning tea, I skim through the RSS feeds.  Skimming the couple dozen blogs I subscribe to, although occasionally taking more time for a deeper read of an interesting topic or discussion.  I think both the behaviours, regular contact with occasional immersion contribute to developing and sustaining a blog community.

In the blogs in which I feel a sense of community, I need both the consistent contact that comes from regular posting and those bursts of activity around hot topics.  It is a little like my neighbourhood community.  I walk every day along the same streets.  It gives me a sense of familiarity with the houses and people, but not much of an emotional connection.  One day when I was walking home from school, though, a car lost its load on a steep hill.  People stopped and looked and helped until the situation was resolved.  During that period I talked to some other people in the neighbourhood that I hadn’t seen or stopped to interact with before.  After the event, I felt a greater sense of community.  I had a shared history with other members.  I could identify other members.  I had a personal connection to that street because of the event.  I think those same aspects of time hold true for blog communities as well.

One characteristic of time is quite different in blog communities from place-based ones.  In blogs, sense of time is almost always relative.  RL which is not only full of sychronous interactions, but is also quite aware of the date and time such as “it’s noon – let’s go to lunch”, “It is Waitangi Day – it is a holiday”, “it is 5pm – time to go home”, etc.  Blogs postings are either recent or old always in relation to the day you are viewing them.  Or they are newer or older in comparison to the other posts.  It doesn’t really matter if I someone commented on 31 January to a post, but more importantly, it has been 4 days since they commented and I have still not replied.  Because blog time is relative, it means that there is a flow to blog conversations.  Members of the community interact within these ebbs and flows of slow and peak activity.  However, the connection seems to be quite tenous and if someone gets out of sync (either from infrequent posting or reading) they can easily lose their sense of community and no longer be a member.  Like the punch line of Little Bunny Foo Foo – “Hair today, goon tomorrow”.  How ephemeral blog communities can be.

Recognising Community

I have been reading (and writing) quite a bit about blog communities over the past month and couldn’t help but notice the parallels to my RL (real life) communities.  It first struck me a few days back when I was dodging the tourists in the Octagon as I walked home from school.  Last summer I spent the height of tourist season as a tourist myself on the North Island, so this is the first year I really experienced it here.  I am not sure how often the cruise ships arrive, but it seems that every few days bus after bus descends on Dunedin from the port full to the brim with tourists.  They wander the streets, cameras in hand, in tightly knit groups.  Often with name tags and matching bags too.  In a 10 block walk down George Street, I will be asked for directions once or twice every day.

One of the key features of developing a sense of community is established boundaries which define not only who is in the community, but almost more importantly – who is not in the community.  So knowing where things are and not having to follow a map is a community boundary – Dunedin-ites are part of this community and tourists are not.  But it is more than just that because I learned my way around after a few weeks (ok months) of living here – but have only come to see myself as part of the community in the past year.  So what else gives me a sense of community here?

I remember the first time I went grocery shopping and ran into someone I knew.  When I got back to the flat, I remember thinking – “wow, this is really home for me now” (followed a few months later by – “I need to remember to brush my hair before going to the store because you ~always~ run into people – Dunedin is a small place).  So a network of identifiable members, must also be quite important.

For me, though, it all started to feel like my community, when I could speak the language.  I am a native English speaker, so it wasn’t about just learning a language – it was about understanding how to use the language to communicate – really speaking the language.  Some things were fairly simple to “translate” or pick up.  I take out the rubbish, not the garbage.  Organisation has an “s” and no “z” (pronounced zed).  I take holidays, not vacations.  There are  hundreds more that I learned over that first year, that I can’t even remember now.  But as anyone who has learned another language knows, it isn’t just about the words – it is about meaning.  So in my second year I started to understand how (and why) things work the way they do.  I got a job, became a permanent resident, got a driver’s license, learned to drive a car on the left (properly w/o terrifying the other occupants), learned the national anthem, and the rules of rugby and cricket (well the important ones) among hundreds more.  Through my personal experiences and relationships with other members of the community, I now have a common history, language, rituals, and experiences.

I still call Washington home, but now I call Dunedin home too.

Links and SNAs and puppy dog tails?

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.

How to win friends and influence people

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.

Chinese whispers and the Mexican wave

The world is getting smaller.  It is difficult to remain isolated from other regions of the world, even when you want to.  I see UK shows every time I turn on the TV.  I read Australian  magazines.  I went to a German film festival. Every time the price of a barrel of oil increases in US dollars, I pay more for my petrol in NZ dollars.  When Chinese consumers started drinking more milk, I could no longer afford to buy cheese and butter every week.  That’s globalisation, right?

So what I wonder about is how do regional behaviours and norms still survive in a world of global influences?  Today at a cricket game we did the “Mexican Wave“.  Now I have been going to baseball games and doing “The Wave” for years (my hometown claims the first wave), but why is it called Mexican here following the British/European tradition?  And how, with all of Hollywood’s cultural dominance, is it possible for local idioms and dialects to survive?

In a blogging context, in which community members can potentially be from all over the world, are there “local” behaviours that develop?  How do they survive with the constant influence of dominant cultures and the frequent influx of new members?

So, if this message is passed on and gets garbled in the process, is it a Chinese Whisper or like the game of Telegraph?  Or maybe in blogs it will be called a broken meme…

NOTE:  I don’t know if the google-ability of terms and sayings will influence how well they are preserved within blogging cultures, but I found it interesting that both Chinese whispers and Mexican wave were much easier to google than their American counterparts.

See mii, feel mii, touch mii

Closely tied to blog community is a member’s sense of identity.  What makes someone identify with a blogging community assuming we understand what a blogging community looks like (see http://famartinniemi.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/word-of-the-day-community/)?  It must be related to personal identity.

A few weeks ago we got a Wii.  I have never been very interested in console or computer games (except Civilisation – which I have wasted many late nights playing).  The Wii seemed a little different, you create an avatar “mii” which plays against other miis and in the case of Wii Fit, adjusts according to your actual size.  So I made a mii which was very cute and reflected how I felt about myself – freckles, dark hair, tan skin, etc, but the Wii Fit module has done something quite unexpected.  When it calculated my weight and BMI it made my mii chubby!  Now I know that I am overweight, but I don’t think of that in my external personification of myself.  So it is quite alarming to see fat-mii each time I play the game.

So for blogging, I think identity or characteristics that make one identify with a blogging community can vary depending on which ones are chosen for that particular venue.  For example, I identify with the depth and topic in research related blogs.  I look for wit and cleverness in others.  For friends’ blogs I judge my level of identification with the blogging group on how well I know (in RL) the other members.  And my depth of participation is directly related to how well I feel my identity for that group matches the community’s identity.

It is fair to say that if Wii Fit had a blog which saw me as fat-mii, I wouldn’t want to be a member.

Word of the Day – Community

Define community.  It reminds me of the scene in Reality Bites (a film I have unsuccessfully been trying to forget from the moment I saw it).  It did have a few not-completely-annoying scenes, though, including when Winona Rider’s character was asked to define ‘irony’ in a job interview.

Irony. Uh…
Irony.
It’s a noun.
It’s when something is… ironic. It’s, uh…
Well, I can’t really define irony… but I know it when I see it!

I can completely relate to that because every time I am asked – “what do you mean by blog community?” – I revert to a stuttering mess.  “uh, well, you know when community members interact within a community…well, I can’t really define it, but I think I’ll recognise it when I see it.”  Yikes.  So I have decided that I should really get a better definition (at least in my own mind) of community.

There are many academic articles which define community and that is part of the problem (see http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/22/open-issues-for-researchthinking-on-communities/).  But as I have been reading articles on blogging communities, some patterns have emerged in characteristics of these unusual communities.

1. Community in a blog context is a continually changing beast.  Some authors describe the ‘burstiness’ of blogging behaviour among community members – meaning that some topics are hot and there is heaps of activity and some times it is pretty quiet.  Moreover, the community members come and go and in the case of lurkers, are never really ever “there” visibly except statistically.  So with this ebb and flow of interaction and membership, blogging communities are not really defined by firm borders, but are more like amorphous blobs.
2. Identifying blog communities requires detective work.  When I first started thinking about blogs, I thought about what makes up a blog community i.e. blogs, blogger, commenters, and readers.  However, it is difficult to identify blog communities by looking for these object (nodes).  The telltale signs of blog communities come from the links, connections and spaces between the artefacts of blogs (see https://doc.freeband.nl/dsweb/Get/Document-46041/weblog_community_boundaries.pdf).  It is difficult to read and correctly interpret this space between the people and the blogs.  It requires someone who knows what they are looking for in the nuances of links, references, and terminology used.

So what is community, (hopefully) I’ll know it when I see it…