Mod. 5.1 - Links

Discussion: Noor F. Ali-Hasan/Lada A. Adamic - Expressing Social Relationships on the Blog through Links and Comments (2007)
Abbreviation: computer-mediated communication (CMC)

'Bloggers tend to frequent the same blogs and build relationships with bloggers that share similar interests [13]. These cliques are often referred to as blogospheres, sets of highly linked and intertwined blogs.'

Abbreviation: computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW)


'Of the motivations for keeping a blog, it was found that three of them (“update others on activities and whereabouts[,] express opinions to influence others[, and] seek others‟ opinions and feedback”) involved communicating with others. They also found that communication sometimes extends to other media, including email, instant messaging, and face-to-face conversation.'

Explanatory remarks:
'Social relationships can be expressed online as different forms of blog ties:

Blogroll links are usually located in the blog‟s sidebar and point to other blogs that the author may read or simply want to always include on her main page.

Citation links are made by bloggers within their own posts and can reference an entire blog or just a particular post on that blog. By their nature, they occur at a fixed time point, but may be repeated. Repeated citations can serve as a weight for the tie – with more frequent citations indicating a greater interest of one blog for another.

Comment links are not necessarily hyperlinks per se, but an interaction that occurs when one person, possibly a blogger, adds a comment to another blogger‟s post.

For both blogrolls and citations, the communication is indirect. It occurs on the blog with the blogroll or citing blog post, but may be noticed by the blog being referenced through blog search engines, server logs, or through TrackBacks. Trackbacks allow the citing blog to notify the blog receiving the citation that their post has been discussed [4]. The receiving blog will typically display the TrackBack, along with summary text of the citing post. Readers are then able to follow conversations across several blogs by traversing TrackBacks.'


'...we observe that bloggers receiving many comments will comment on their own post in reply to others‟ comments.'

'Overall, we see a country-level affinity of the blogs. The 5 most blogrolled blogs for all three communities are blogs from the respective countries. But for the DFW blogs, all (dooce.com, michellemalkin.com, powerlineblog.com, captainsquartersblog.com) but the last of the top 5 blogs are A-list blogs in the United States that are outside of Dallas/Fort Worth . DFW blogs also have the highest percentage of blogroll links to blogs outside of their community (91%), while Kuwait has the lowest (53%). These community statistics are reflected in Figure 3, showing blogroll networks including external blogs linked to by blogs from within the community.'

Comment on the above: I don't regard these results as surprising. While Kuwait is a country in itself without different states, Dallas/Fort Worth are cities in Texas which again is a United State of America. The UAE is a federation of different emirates. It would be interesting to know what the authors regard as the community in Kuwait and what they regard the community in the UAE. E.g. would a place outside Dubai be outside the community? Kuwait again is the only city in a country as big as Denmark, what is regarded outside the community there, compared to the explanation for Dallas/Fort Worth?

Survey results, asking the motivation behind blogging for the above three communities: The most popular choice across communities actually was... the simple desire to express oneself through blogging.

'While DFW bloggers may have been less motivated to find new friends, they were twice as likely to be interested in maintaining existing relationships with friends and family through blogging (46%), than either the Kuwait (26%) or UAE bloggers (23%) (p < 0.05). One blogger from Dallas/Fort Worth shared her enthusiasm for keeping in touch through blogs:
I wish everybody would blog. It's such an easy way of
knowing what's up in someone's life and what thoughts
are on their mind, important or not. People often think,
'Oh, nobody'd want to read about /my/ boring life,' but
really, sometimes just seeing the world from someone
else's point of view can be fascinating.'

I dont find this finding surprising either. The conception of the self in Arabian countries is different from the US, which should have significantly different influence on the way people maintain relations in these countries.

'Furthermore, in the case of Kuwait and UAE bloggers, many blog anonymously by using a pseudonym, and so are potentially able to keep their real-world and blogging interactions separate. This also correlates with our earlier mentioned finding that UAE and Kuwait bloggers were less interested in blogging to share news
with friends and family.'

Again, being part of a conservative social community in Real Life, blogging anonymously might be a great opportunity to freely express oneself, without fearing suppression or rejection.

Translation: Reciprocity - Wechselseitigeit

Discussion: Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis "From the Bottom Up" (2005)
Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, John C. Paolillo, Lois Ann Scheidt,
Michael Tyworth, Peter Welsch, Elijah Wright, and Ning Yu
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University Bloomington

'We use 'A-list' as an operational shorthand to refer to the most popular blogs as determined by number of inbound links, a practice that also underlies the identification of "top-100" lists of blogs posted to the web. Some bloggers dislike this term, perhaps because of its implied elitism.'

Abbreviation: Social network analysis (SNA)

'The small world phenomenon, initially described by Milgram (1967), is a condition of interconnectedness in the real world whereby two random U.S. citizens were found to be connected by an average of six acquaintances.'

This phenomenon is not restricted to the US. It works all over the world.





How to get a meaningful A-list of blogs:

‘Top 100 lists, however, calculate the number of inbound links by disparate means (see 2.2.), and thus their contents differ. To get as accurate a list of A-list blogs as possible, we generated a composite ranking derived from the NITLE Blog Census, the Technorati Top 100, and the TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem. Blogs that appeared in any two of the three ranking systems and were ranked in the top 100 of their system were included in the composite A-list measure. The original ranking from each system was noted for each blog. For blogs appearing in two of the ranking systems but not the third, a third, arbitrary ranking of 114 was entered, and the three rankings were averaged. This was done to weight in favor of those blogs that appeared in all three ranking systems. This method resulted in a composite list, independent of the list of blogs generated as described above, of 45 ranked unique URLs.’

‘To create the visualizations, the Pajek visualization tool was used (http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/), together with the Kamada-Kawai energy algorithm for the lay out.’

‘It is notable that in no case did a blog reference another blog only once—all the pairs that engaged in reciprocal referencing did so on multiple occasions, suggesting the existence of a relationship between them, not just a one-time exchange. These findings support the existence of interconnection and conversation in the blogosphere.’

‘Yet only about one-quarter of all initially randomly-generated blogs were found to have any outbound links to other blogs. Including inbound links raises the percentage of random blogs connected in some way to other blogs to 58%,7 but that still leaves 42% of the blogs tracked by blo.gs that appear to be social isolates, neither linking to nor being linked to by others.’

‘The blogosphere appears to be selectively interconnected, with dense clusters in parts, and blogs minimally connected in local neighborhoods, or free-floating individually, constituting the majority. Moreover, it seems likely that the much-touted textual conversation that all of the blogosphere is supposed to be engaged in involves a minority of blogs as well, and sporadic activity even among those blogs (for example, no dyads interacted publicly on theirblogs every day, similar to the finding of Kumar, et al., 2003 that interactions among blogs are "bursty").

‘Future directions
The analysis reported in this study was carried out on a sample of 5,517 weblogs that were manually identified by following hyperlinks from four random blogs. It was not our original intention to collect the blogs manually, as identification is tedious, but we encountered difficulties with the several blog identification algorithms we tried to use, all of which had unacceptably high rates of error. One of our future goals is to refine one of these algorithms to reduce the rate of error sufficiently so that much larger samples can be generated from random blogs, at further degrees of separation. The present analysis is proof of the concept, and succeeded in identifying patterns that would not have emerged as readily by other means, e.g., the Catholic and homeschooling blog cliques; it further revealed their network configurations and their relationships to A-list blogs. We hope to produce a more complete mapping of such topical communities when we are able to generate larger sample blogospheres from the bottom up, and/or to generate multiple local blogospheres from individual random source blogs. Simultaneously, we are directing efforts toward devising methods of sampling, analysis, and visualization that will render apparent patterns involving less-connected blogs.’