Annotated bibliography – Organisational benefits of blogging

Shortly after blogging hit the mainstream, firms started trying to figure out how to tap into the phenomenon.  The initial foray was through marketing (more on that to come) when firms started reading or lurking around consumer blogs and watching what was said about them.  Then firms tried to give it a go themselves, with limited success, by turning their press releases into PR blogs.  The manipulative tone was the exact opposite of what the blogging community expected and valued.  Now firms are letting employees blogs within varying limits and bringing blogging behind the firewall.  Again, I am not sure firms really get why blogging works, with most organisational blogs being less successful than those on the outside.  Too much focus on the mechanics of blogging and too much control and too little focus on providing employees with the freedom to explore the environment and let it become their own.

This is a long list, so again, I am just including a sentence or two from the abstracts.  Enjoy…

Bar-Ilan, J. (2005). Information hub blogs. Journal of Information Science, 31(4), 297-307.

Blogging has become an important activity on the web; the number of web blogs is growing extremely fast, and thus this phenomenon cannot be ignored. This paper monitors a set of blogs for a two-month period in September-October 2003 and characterizes these blogs based on descriptive statistics and content analysis. We have chosen a set of topic-oriented blogs, i.e. blogs whose purpose is to convey professional information.

Cayzer, S. (2004). Semantic Blogging and Decentralized Knowledge Management. Communications of the ACM, 47(12), 47-52.

This article focuses on a system capable of aggregating, annotating, indexing and searching a community’s snippets.

Cox, J. L., Martinez, E. R., & Quinlan, K. B. (2008). Blogs and the corporation: managing the risk, reaping the benefits. Journal of Business Strategy, 29(3).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of blogs in corporate communication and proposes general policies to help corporations effectively and ethically use blogs.

Dearstyne, B. W. (2005). BLOGS The New Information Revolution? Information Management Journal, 39(5), 38-44.

This article discusses the emerging popularity of Weblogs, its categories, and the areas in which records and information management (RIM) managers can influence blog policy.

Ip, R. K. F., & Wagner, C. (2008). Weblogging: A study of social computing and its impact on organizations. [Article]. Decision Support Systems, 45(2), 242-250.

This article reviews weblogs and their role as a social networking device for young people and its probable evolution to the organizational computing medium.

Kaiser, S., & Müller-Seitz, G. (2008). Leveraging Lead User Knowledge in Software Development – The Case of Weblog Technology. Industry & Innovation, 15(2), 199-221.

Firms increasingly rely upon information technology (IT) to manage organizational knowledge, though this does not inevitably result in increased knowledge sharing.

Kaiser, S., Müller-Seitz, G., Pereira Lopes, M., & Pina E Cunha, M. (2007). Weblog-Technology as a Trigger to Elicit Passion for Knowledge. Organization, 14(3), 391-412.

The practice of Weblogging as a new social and technological phenomenon in society and business is gaining a growing number of supporters.

Miller, R. (2007). Breaker, breaker: Is the blogosphere today’s CB radio? Public Relations Tactics, 14(11), 17-22.

The article offers tips on how a company can protect its brand online in the U.S. Blogging is sometimes disadvantageous to a company’s product because the criticisms made by bloggers can either make or break a company.

Ojala, M. (2005). Blogging: For knowledge sharing, management and dissemination. Business Information Review, 22(4), 269-276.

The article discusses the significant benefits of weblogs as vehicles for knowledge management initiatives.

Pabarskaite, Z. (2003). Decision trees for web log mining. Intelligent Data Analysis, 7(2), 141.

Complex and extensive web sites are becoming more and more popular. Companies need to justify their investments.

Pinnock, S. R. (2005). Organizing virtual environments: National union deployment of the blog and new cyberstrategies. WorkingUSA, 8(4), 457-468.

Over the past decade, the use of information technology (IT) by American unions to enhance organizing initiatives has been slow and uneven.

Richards, J. (2008). Because I need somewhere to vent: The expression of conflict through work blogs. New Technology, Work and Employment, 23(1-2), 95-110.

Employee resistance has traditionally been analysed as an activity that occurs in the work organisation. In recent years, new Internet communication technologies, such as blogs, have expanded the possibilities for employees to express conflict. This paper explores how these developments can add to our understandings of employee resistance to the labour process.

Ringberg, T., & Reihlen, M. (2008). Towards a Socio-Cognitive Approach to Knowledge Transfer. The Journal of Management Studies, 45(5), 912.

We present first a critique of the positivist and social constructionist positions; then we introduce a socio-cognitive model that captures and explicates socio-cognitive processes involved in sense making during knowledge transfer. Finally, we explore future research streams and managerial implications.

Sprague, R. (2007). Business Blogs and Commercial Speech: A New Analytical Framework for the 21st Century. American Business Law Journal, 44(1), 127-159.

The article focuses on the free speech rights in light of the introduction and influence of Internet Web logs, popularly known as blogs that is applied to businesses. The author reflects that substantial part of business-related communications is beginning to occur in blogs, including advertising which the commercial speech doctrine has not subjected to regulation.

Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Neither Hayek nor Habermas. Public Choice, 134(1/2), 87-95.

The rise of the blogosphere raises important questions about the elicitation and aggregation of information, and about democracy itself.

Wagner, C. (2005). Supporting Knowledge Management in Organizations with Conversational Technologies: Discussion Forums, Weblogs, and Wilds. Journal of Database Management, 16(2), 1-1.

The article reviews requirements and tool availability for knowledge management in virtual communities and other knowledge sharing environments, where professionals wish to quickly and easily share knowledge and information.

Ward, R. (2006). Blogs and wikis: A personal journey. Business Information Review, 23(4), 235-240.

Describes the use of social software and social media, incorporating blogs and wikis, to develop websites to support internal communication and collaboration in a law firm.

Wyld, D. C. (2008). Management 2.0: a primer on blogging for executives. Management Research News, 31(6), 448-483.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how corporate executives of companies are using blogging as a new communications channel.

Xifra, J., & Huertas, A. (2008). Blogging PR: An exploratory analysis of public relations weblogs. Public Relations Review, 34(3), 269-275.

Although there are ever more weblogs on the Internet, this is an area that has been little researched in public relations, and where they have been analyzed it has been as a tool for communication rather than a primary information source in the public relations body of knowledge.

Annotated bibliography – web 2.0 blogging literature

It is so typical that half way through my literature review and I have changed the way I am organising my thoughts on blogging.  Part of the change of heart was the realisation that I really (really!) needed to focus my research questions on my Masters thesis instead of the PhD that I hope to start working on next year.  So here is my new structure, 7 categories with the first centring on articles about the “newness” factor of blogging and web 2.0 as mechanism for collaboration and communication.

Adams, S. A. (2008). Blog-based applications and health information: Two case studies that illustrate important questions for Consumer Health Informatics (CHI) research. International Journal of Medical Informatics, In Press, Corrected Proof.

Weblogs (blogs), together with podcasts and wikis are part of the larger body of next-generation communication applications dubbed “web 2.0.” Within the specific area of health care, little attention has been devoted to understanding what applications are available to the lay public and how these are being used. In this study, a literature review on blogs and blogging practices was conducted, followed by case study analyses of two separate sites that use blogging tools to help patients and other lay web end-users record health-related experiences. This paper explores the diverse purposes for which blogging applications can be (or are being) used in relation to health and introduces the idea of “health goal-oriented” blogging. The discussion focuses on relevant informatics questions that arise with respect to the use of blogs and makes suggestions for subsequent research.

Blood, R. (2000). Weblogs: A History and Perspective. Journal. Retrieved from http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

In 1998 there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as weblogs (so named by Jorn Barger in December 1997). Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift, began compiling a list of “other sites like his” as he found them in his travels around the web. In November of that year, he sent that list to Cameron Barrett. Cameron published the list on Camworld, and others maintaining similar sites began sending their URLs to him for inclusion on the list. Jesse’s ‘page of only weblogs’ lists the 23 known to be in existence at the beginning of 1999. Suddenly a community sprang up. It was easy to read all of the weblogs on Cameron’s list, and most interested people did. Peter Merholz announced in early 1999 that he was going to pronounce it ‘wee-blog’ and inevitably this was shortened to ‘blog’ with the weblog editor referred to as a ‘blogger.’

Cohen, E., & Krishnamurthy, B. (2006). A short walk in the Blogistan. Computer Networks, 50(5), 615-630.

The increasingly prominent new subset of Web pages, called blogs differs from traditional Web pages both in characteristics and potential to applications. We explore three aspects of the blogistan: its overall scope and size, identification of emerging hot topics of discussion and link patterns, and implications both to blogs and applications such as search. Beyond blogs, we develop a general methodology of mining evolving networks and connections. The first part of our study is longitudinal–based on a five-week continuous fetch of a seed collection of nearly 10,000 blog URLs. The second part is based on a successive crawl of pages suspected to be blogs leading to a larger collection of several million URLs. The collection is examined for a variety of properties. We characterize blogs and study different facets of the link structure in blogs and its evolution over time, attributes of servers and domains that host many of the blogs including their IP addresses, and how blogs behave with respect to various HTTP/1.1 protocol issues. Inferences from our in-depth exploration are relevant to applications ranging from mining to hosting of blogs and other issues of relevance to the measurement community.

Dearstyne, B. W. (2007). Blogs, Mashups, & Wikis Oh, My! Information Management Journal, 41(4), 24-33.

This article focuses on Web 2.0, which refers to the perceived new generation of Web-based services that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users, and explains its relevance to records and information management (RIM) professionals. It says that Web 2.0 is changing the way people work and the way records and documents are created, exchanged and used and this trend poses new challenges for RIM professionals. Examples of Web 2.0 services include MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and Second Life.

Gurak, L. J., Antonijevic, S., Johnson, L., Ratliff, C., & Reyman, J. (2004). Introduction: Weblogs, Rhetoric, Community, and Culture. Journal. Retrieved from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/introduction.html

During the past two decades, we have witnessed the introduction of many new digital spaces for writing and communicating, from hypertext, to chat rooms, to newsgroups, to discussion boards, to MOOS and MUDs, to wikis, to peer-to-peer file sharing networks. The proliferation of new spaces for communicating via the Internet has evoked scholarship in the fields of communication, rhetoric, composition, and writing studies from researchers seeking to address the social, rhetorical, and discursive implications. Recently, there has emerged a new object for study of great rhetorical impact: the weblog. The scholarly exploration of weblogs is still new, having up to this point taken place at primarily at conferences.

Secker, J., & Price, G. (2007). Libraries, social software and distance learners: blog it, tag it, share it! New Review of Information Networking, 39-52.

This paper describes a recent project funded by the University of London to explore how social software or Web 2.0 technologies can enhance the use of libraries by distance learners. LASSIE (Libraries And Social Software In Education) involves a team of librarians, learning technologists and archivists. The project first conducted an extensive literature review, which is available online. The literature review provides an overview of key social software and explores the current implementation of these tools by libraries. It also considers the key issues in supporting distance learners’ use of libraries and whether social software might provide solutions. The literature review was followed by several case studies to explore specific types of social software in practice. These included the use of social bookmarking for sharing resources, social software and online reading lists, blogging in the library community, the use of social networking sites and podcasting for information literacy support. LASSIE will be completed in December 2007 and a final report with results from the case studies and an updated literature review will be made available from the project website. One of the successes of the project has been to establish a project blog, which provides the project team with an opportunity to reflect on progress, but also to gather opinions from others in the field.

Wyld, D. C. (2008). Management 2.0: a primer on blogging for executives. Management Research News, 31(6), 448-483.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how corporate executives of companies are using blogging as a new communications channel. The paper presents an overview of the blogging phenomenon, placing it in context of the larger growth of Web 2.0 and user-generated content. The paper provides the reader with a primer on blogs and how they can be used effectively by executives, as well as looking at the importance of monitoring the blogosphere for what is being said by and about a company. Over 50 corporate CEOs were found who are presently engaged in blogging. The research also identifies companies where employees have been fired for blogging and presents best practices in blogging and blog policies. The principal limitation of the research is that as blogging is a rapidly growing and evolving area, the present results on executive blogging are accurate only for the moment. The implications of this research are that it provides the foundation for surveying not only the status of blogging by managers but also an agenda for blogging research, which might examine blogging behaviours, develop blog metrics and look toward the return on investment of blogging. The paper reveals the benefits of managerial blogging for both the company and the individual. It also examines issues concerned with human resources, financial disclosure and policy development that have arisen because of the rise of blogging within companies. The paper represents a timely review of a rapidly evolving social network and its associated communications technology, providing both management practitioners and academicians with insights into managing in a new age.