Exploring the Role of the Reader in the Activity of Blogging

Lead Researcher:Eric Baumer

School of Information and Computer SciencesDepartment of Informatics

Co-Researcher/Presenter:Mark Sueyoshi

SURF-IT Fellow

Faculty Advisor:Bill Tomlinson

School of Information and Computer Sciences

Department of Informatics

University of California, Irvine (UCI)Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Information Technology (SURF-IT)Thursday, August 30, 2007

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

45%

July, 2002 Mar, 2003 Feb, 2004 Nov, 2004 July, 2006

Percent of Internet users

Blog Creators Blog Readers

Focusing on the Rising NumbersGrowth of the Blogosphere

Data from Pew Internet & American Life Project, “The State of Blogging”, Jan. 2005; “Bloggers”, July 2006

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

45%

July, 2002 Mar, 2003 Feb, 2004 Nov, 2004 July, 2006

Percent of Internet users

Blog Creators Blog Readers

Growth of the Blogosphere

57 Million

12 Million

August, 2007

Previous Work on Blogs

• Fairly recent topic for study

• Lenhart: Slow norm development

• Nardi: Social nature of blogging

• boyd: Need for self-awareness tools

• The neglected reader

Why Blog Readers?

• Blogging is a social activity

• Readers contribute and shape blogs

• Specific Foci - Ways blog readers contribute

• Comments

• Reading

• Interaction beyond the blog

A Different Approach

• Reader-response theory (e.g. Stanley Fish, C.S. Lewis, Norman Holland

• Arose in the 1960’s and 1970’s

• Reader creates meaning

• Author creates potential for construction of that meaning

Methods

• Ethnographic Study

• Recruitment

• Result of Recruitment

• Two Interviews, semi-structured

• First - exploratory

• Second - focused

• Blog Logging

Findings and Results:Common Blog Reading

Practices

• Habitual

• Pottering

• Information overload?

• Non-chronous

• Order matters, not time(stamps)

I don’t know if I look forward to [reading blogs]…I don’t really look forward to cigarettes anymore, but it’s something that happens through the course of the day that I feel like I might need to do. It just becomes habit, I guess. -Charles

Findings and Results: Other Blog Reading

Practices

• “It Depends”

• Motivations

• Relationship

• Perceptions of blogs

• blog website versus non-blog website.

has like personal opinions that’s…more of like a journal, I think, of things going on in that person’s life. Like a regular website…it could be anything I guess.

Patricia: A blog is something that’s still going on, that still has a conversation going on, that has people commenting, [it] doesn’t have to be all the time, but it does have this dialogue between the person who’s posting and the people who are reading, yeah that’s a blog.Interviewer: So when the conversation stops does it stop being a blog?Patricia: By my definition, yeah it’s a dead site.

What is a Blog?

• Formal Definition:

• “A web page that is frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological order” (Herring et al.)

• Participant definitions• “newspaper”, “diary”, & “journal”

• Nebulous

Obligations from the Perspective of the Blog

Reader• Obligations of Bloggers

• Frequent updates, aesthetically pleasing, navigable

• Obligations of Readers

• Comments, indication of readership

• Obligations change depending on context - Reader Response

• Useful to focus on the ways readers read blogs rather than the structure of blogs

• Popular blog versus blogs of friends

Becoming a Regular Reader

• Reading for Information

• Reading for the Blogger

• Reading for the Information and staying for the blogger

• Dynamic interaction across time

“At first, when he was posting pictures about his cat, not that I thought it was a little nutty, but it was like, ‘what’s the sense in doing this?’, but then I would read the entries and they would be really cute or hilarious pictures so then I became even a fan of the cat postings then I was like, ‘oh my god… this is so petty’…. he’s a charismatic person so pretty much any topic you’ll get some sort of satisfaction or chuckle out of some.”

Research Implications

• Salient themes concerning blog readers

• Offline/online

• Proper interaction

• Heterogeneity of blog readers

• Demographics and dissimilarities

Design Implications

• Tools self-awareness

• Aware of the ‘why’, not particularly the ‘how’

• “5 minutes turns into 50”

• “it’s like checking your email”

Future Research

• Integrative

• Bloggers as well as blog readers

• Longitudinal

• Interactions in relation to time

Conclusion

• Blog readers are significant in the construction construction of meaning in the activity of blogging.

• Blog readers experience and interact with blogs differently depending on motivations, perceptions, content of blog, personal relationships.

• Blogs are far more heterogeneous than previous research has suggested

Acknowledgments

Calit2

SURF-IT

Social Code Group