Post-adoption switching behavior for online service substitutes: A perspective of the push–pull–mooring framework

The post-adoption behaviors of online service users are critical performance factors for online service providers. To fill an academic gap that persists regarding bloggers’ switching behavior across online service substitutes, this empirical study investigates which factors affect bloggers who switch social network sites, in an attempt to understand specifically how push, pull, and mooring factors shape their switching intentions. The data to test the hypotheses come from an online survey of 319 bloggers, analyzed using partial least squares techniques. The results confirm positive influences of push and pull effects, a negative influence of mooring effects, and an interactive effect of push and mooring on switching intentions. The push–pull–mooring framework thus is a useful tool for comprehending the competing forces that influence the use of online service substitutes. In particular, perceptions of weak connections and writing anxiety push bloggers away, whereas relative enjoyment and usefulness pull bloggers to social network sites; switching cost and past experience also inhibit a change. These findings offer key insights and implications for the competitive strategy choices of online service providers.     

Prompting authentic blogging practice in an online graduate course

Blogging is characterized by an individual exploration of ideas of personal interest through frequent online posts, documenting ideas as they emerge over time. Community emerges as bloggers read and link across blogs, based on shared interests. Blogs have gained acceptance in higher education for a variety of instructional activities, among which, reflective journal writing is popular. In this study, we examine a project in which blogs were implemented within an online graduate course in order to create opportunities for students to reflect on their academic, professional and personal interests, with the goal of establishing consistent blogging that exhibits the timely, frequent and interest-driven practices of blogging practices outside educational contexts. Students enrolled in an online graduate course maintained individual blogs in which they were prompted to write about their interests and experiences as graduate students. Through an analysis of the patterns of prompt use and blog content, as well as data from a post-course survey and an online discussion, we explore how to support student engagement with blogging practice within an educational setting. Findings suggest that frequency of writing, topic resonance with the students own interests, and the timeliness of entries were key factors in scaffolding writing that aligns with blogging practice. By focusing on writing as characterized by authentic blogging practice, this study contributes to an understanding of how to harness the unique communicative elements of the blog in post-secondary settings.     

irBlogs: A standard collection for studying Persian bloggers

A large number of internet users share their knowledge and opinions in online social networks like forums, weblogs, etc. This fact has attracted many researchers from different fields to study online social networks. The Persian language is one of the dominant languages in the Middle East which is the official language of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan; so, a large number of Persians are active in online social networks. Despite this fact, very few studies exist about Persian social networks. In this paper we will study the characteristics of Persian bloggers based on a new collection, named irBlogs. The collection contains nearly 5 million posts and the network of more than 560,000 Persian bloggers which assures the reliability of the results of this study. Some of the analyzed characteristics are: the similarities and the differences between formal Persian and the language style that is used by Persian bloggers, the interests of the bloggers and the impact of other web resources on Persian blogosphere. Our analysis show that IT, sports, society, culture and politics are the main interests of Persian bloggers. Also, analysis of the links that are shared by Persian bloggers shows that news agencies, knowledge-bases and other social networks have a great impact on Persian bloggers and they are interested to share multimedia content.     

Anonymity and Self-Disclosure on Weblogs

Bloggers are typically cautious about engaging in self-disclosure because of concerns that what they post may have negative consequences. This article examines the relationship between anonymity (both visual and discursive) and self-disclosure on weblogs through an online survey. The results suggest that increased visual anonymity is not associated with greater self-disclosure, and the findings about the role of discursive anonymity are mixed. Bloggers whose target audience does not include people they know offline report a higher degree of anonymity than those whose audience does. Future studies need to explore the reasons why bloggers visually and discursively identify themselves in particular ways.     

Blog scrubbing: Exploring triggers that change privacy rules

An increasing number of individuals of all ages maintain important interpersonal relationships through blogs. Wide variation exists in how people disclose and manage their privacy on these blogs, particularly concerning the choices made about leaving information permanently visible on blogs or retrieving it sometime after an initial posting. This study applies Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory to explore the process of privacy rule adaptation for blogging by examining situations that have triggered bloggers to change their privacy rules to enact blog post deletion practices (“blog scrubbing”). Overall, open-ended responses from 356 bloggers were content analyzed. Chi-square analysis revealed differences in the frequency of triggers that changed the blogging post privacy rules and the proactive versus reactive nature of blogging privacy management deletion practices. Bloggers’ critical incidents that activate privacy rule changes demonstrate that impression management triggers, personal safety identity triggers, relational triggers, and legal/disciplinary triggers resulted in greater alteration of individual privacy rules used to protect these bloggers from the privileged online community of individuals granted access to an individual’s blog. Thus, bloggers essentially “scrubbed” their blog site and adapted their typical privacy rules with new ones that better protected them from the online community regarding that particular blogged information.     

Gender Differences in British Blogging

This article asks whether blogging in the United Kingdom, which started later than in the United States, reproduces the gender differences in blogging behavior and the gender inequalities in recognition that have been observed in studies based largely on U.S. bloggers. A sample of 48 female and male British bloggers answered a questionnaire about their blogging practices and attitudes; data were also collected from their blogs and by means of online tools. For both sexes, blogging is mainly a leisure activity, and men and women find the same range of satisfactions in blogging. However, more women use blogging as an outlet for creative work, whether as a hobby or as a livelihood. The results support several reasons advanced in previous research for the lower public profile of women bloggers.     

The determinants of continuous use of social networking sites: An empirical study on Taiwanese journal-type bloggers’ continuous self-disclosure behavior

The popularity and growth of social networking sites (SNSs) have resulted in fierce competition among SNS providers. A critical concern of SNSs is to identify how to have users continuously use a specific SNS. This study examines the determinants of journal-type bloggers’ continuous self-disclosure. An analysis of 283 samples with continuous self-disclosure experiences in journal-type blogs shows that personal factors, specifically the habit of self-disclosure, are the major factors affecting bloggers’ continuous self-disclosure, followed by self-benefits. In contrast, social factors, such as positive audience feedback and social benefits, are not related to continuous self-disclosure. These results suggest that SNS providers must encourage users to develop the habit of using their web sites regularly. By providing differential benefits to users, SNS providers may attract users to continuously use their services.     

Blogger-Centric Contextual Advertising

Web advertising (online advertising), a form of advertising that uses the World Wide Web to attract customers, has become one of the most commonly-used marketing channels. This paper addresses the concept of Blogger-Centric Contextual Advertising, which refers to the assignment of personal ads to any blog page, chosen in according to bloggers’ interests. As blogs become a platform for expressing personal opinions, they naturally contain various kinds of statements, including facts, comments and statements about personal interests, of both a positive and negative nature. To extend the concept behind the Long Tail theory in contextual advertising, we argue that web bloggers, as the constant visitors of their own blog-sites, could be potential consumers who will respond to ads on their own blogs. Hence, in this paper, we propose using text mining techniques to discover bloggers’ immediate personal interests in order to improve online contextual advertising. The proposed Blogger-Centric Contextual Advertising (BCCA) framework aims to combine contextual advertising matching with text mining in order to select ads that are related to personal interests as revealed in a blog and rank them according to their relevance. We validate our approach experimentally using a set of data that includes both real ads and actual blog pages. The results indicate that our proposed method could effectively identify those ads that are positively-correlated with a blogger’s personal interests.     

Blogging: self presentation and privacy

Blogs are permeating most niches of social life, and addressing a wide range of topics from scholarly and political issues1 to family and children's daily lives. By their very nature, blogs raise a number of privacy issues as they are easy to produce and disseminate, resulting in large amounts of sometimes personal information being broadcast across the Internet in a persistent and cumulative manner. This article reports the preliminary findings of an online survey of bloggers from around the world. The survey explored bloggers' subjective sense of privacy by examining their blogging practices and their expectations of privacy when publishing online. The findings suggest that blogging offers individuals a unique opportunity to work on their self-identity via the degree of self-expression and social interaction that is available in this medium. This finding helps to explain why bloggers consciously bring the 'private' to the public realm, despite the inherent privacy risks they face in doing so.