gi conference 07 blogs workshop
TRANSCRIPT
What is a blog?
• Web log• Brief, dated posts collected on one webpage• Chronologically ordered• Self-archives by date• Majority with the capacity • for readers to leave comments
Early blogs
• Link-driven sites• Filtering the Internet for their readers• Responding to, not creating, the news• Web enthusiasts – needed programming skills
Example of filter blog entry
The New York Times publishes an article entitled "AStartling New Lesson in the Power of Imagery" with thefollowing opening paragraph: ‘They're callous and feeble cartoons, cooked up as aprovocation by a conservative newspaper exploiting thegeneral Muslim prohibition on images of the ProphetMuhammad to score cheap points about freedom ofexpression.’ Readers of the Times will have to take the writer's word for itsince they've never seen the images themselves. But you haveadmire the audacity of the way this whole episode is beingframed here. "Cooked up," "provocation," "exploiting," "cheappoints." And that's just the first sentence!
1999 and arrival of Blogger
• ‘Build-your-own-weblog’ tools• Ease of use• Move to journal blogs• Technorati – over 70 million blogs
What are journal blogs?
• Less links• Smaller readership• More of a diary• Can be personal or linked to work• http://www.neenaw.co.uk • http://finslippy.typepad.com
Example of a journal blog entry
• I see now that using "exciting" and "throwing up" in the same sentence has led many to the conclusion that I'm pregnant. This isn't the case. However, I know from past experience that you probably still think I'm pregnant. People! If I had been pregnant all the times you thought I was we would have infants stacked up like firewood around here...
BUT
• High proportion of blogs are abandoned– Sifry (August 2005) 45%
• Some are never used – test blogs• Others are fake or spam
– Sifry (February 2006) 9%
– http://www.sifry.com
Blog furniture
• Readers’ comments• Data monitoring• The blog roll• Advertising• Blog ring links• http://boogaj.typepad.com/knitting_blogs/• http://www.xanga.com/groups/ • RSS feed – ‘syndicates’ the content and allows it to be read in a
separate reader called an aggregator
Blogging as the Fifth Estate?
• No longer just link logs, include longer articles• Now breaking stories, ie Doug McGill in ’The McGill Report’
breaking the story of genocide in Ethiopia in Dec 2003• Dan Gillmor: ’citizen journalists’• Grassroots journalists taking news into their own hands• Centre for Citizen Media (http://citmedia.org) • Citizen journalism encourages participation in current events by
an educated populace• Bloggers can work together across the world and perfect the
final product
Bloggers are not traditional journalists
• Bloggers are not objective• Bloggers are unpaid: lack the time/commitment to undertake
less glamorous aspects of journalism• Rarely speak directly to witnesses• Blogging as a conversation rather than a lecture• Fifth estate?: overseeing the work of journalists
Who are the bloggers?
• Current or recent students (?)• English speaking and primarily US (?)• Roughly half female, half (or more) young people
Is the blogosphere sexist?
• Most influential bloggers are American males• Popularity is measured in links (ie by Technorati)• Having more links means you are higher in the rankings• Page-ranking algorithms give greater weight to links from blogs
that are themselves highly ranked• Men’s postings receive more comments than women’s (Ratcliff,
2006)• Mainstream media gives more attention to male bloggers
(Herring et al, 2004; Pedersen & Macafee, 2006)• Rise of BlogHer http://www.blogher.org/
Why is there an imbalance?
• Men more likely to author blogs about politics and technology• More likely to blog about external events rather than personal
ones?• More likely to aggressively market their blogs• Women’s blogs make up only 15% of blogrolls (Henning, 2003)• Women link to both men and women, men link to men
(Pedersen & Macafee, 2005)
Why blog?
• Schiano et al: – Diaries
– Newsletter
– Photo album
– Travelogue
– Opinion column
– News digests
– Forum for work
• Pedersen – women gain safe support and validation from blogging
A financial motivation
• Research into motivations has previously focused on intangible rewards– Influencing public opinion; sharing information; creativity
• Large number of respondents hoped their blog would generate income
• Attract new clients to a business• New work• Publishing opportunities• ‘Professional’ bloggers• Carrying advertising
Entering the blogosphere: finding blogs
Search engines that search only blog content
Also offer lists of popular searches, top blogs, etc
• Blogpulse http://www.blogpulse.com/index.html • Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com/• Technorati http://www.technorati.com/• The Truth Laid bear http://truthlaidbear.com/
Information management blogs
• Blogs can filter information for you• They can offer information to your users• Communicate with staff
Examples
• http://www.aurochs.org/aurlog/• http://annoyedlibrarian.blogspot.com/• http://www.libraryman.com/blog/
• http://northmetrotechlibraryatacworth.blogspot.com/ • http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/
Setting up your own blog
• Social networks; blogging plus other community features – MSN Spaces
– Bebo
– LiveJournal
• Cheap and popular - Blogger• Typepad – paid-for service
• More powerful, but more demanding :– Movable Type
– WordPress
Further reading
• Rebecca Blood. Weblogs: a history and perspective. Rebecca’s Pocket [weblog], 7 September 2000. http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html.
• Susan C Herring, Lois Ann Scheidt, Sabrina Bonus and Elijah Wright, Bridging the gap: A genre analysis of weblogs. In: Proceedings of the 37th Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences http://www.blogninja.com/DDGDD04.doc.
• Diane J Schiano, Bonnie A Nardi, Michelle Gumbrecht and Luke Swartz. Blogging by the rest of us. http://home.comcast.net/~diane.schiano/CHI04.Blog.pdf.
• Sarah Pedersen and Caroline Macafee, ‘Gender Differences in British Blogging’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12 (4), July 2007. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/pedersen.html