Every Blog Has Its Day: Politically-interested Internet Users' Perceptions of Blog Credibility

This study employs an online survey to examine U.S. politically-interested Internet users' perceptions of the credibility of blogs. The article focuses on the influence of blog reliance compared to motivations for visiting blogs in determining blog credibility. The study found that blogs were judged as moderately credible, but as more credible than any mainstream media or online source. Both reliance and motivations predicted blog credibility after controlling for demographics and political variables. Reliance proved a consistently stronger predictor than blog motivations. Also, information-seeking motives predicted credibility better than entertainment ones.     

Assessing the effects of interactive blogging on student attitudes towards peer interaction,learning motivation,and academic achievements

Blogs have been increasingly used to supplement traditional classroom lectures in higher education. This paper explores the use of blogs, and how student attitudes towards online peer interaction and peer learning, as well as motivation to learn from peers, may differ when using the blog comments feature, and when students are encouraged to read and comment on each other's work. We contrast two ways blogs affect learning engagement: (1) solitary blogs as personal digital portfolios for writers; or (2) blogs used interactively to facilitate peer interaction by exposing blogging content and comments to peers. A quasi‐experiment was conducted across two semesters, involving 154 graduate and undergraduate students. The result suggests that interactive blogs, compared with isolated blogs, are associated with positive attitudes towards academic achievement in course subjects and in online peer interaction. Students showed positive motivation to learn from peer work, regardless of whether blogs were interactive or solitary.     

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.     

Interacting is believing? Examining bottom‐Up credibility of blogs among politically interested Internet users

This study examines how politically interested Internet users perceive blogs as a credible source of news and information. More specifically, this study aims to identify a new possible factor that has a moderating impact on blog credibility assessment in the collaborative nature of digital media circumstances. This study found that blog credibility was predicted by the interaction between blog reliance and online news activity, indicating that those who more actively interact with news and with other users judge blogs as more credible than those who do less so. Implications of the findings were discussed for future research.     

Trust in product review blogs: the influence of self-disclosure and popularity

Many modern consumers use blogs as important information sources, which they evaluate on the basis of blog-specific cues. Using the theory of self-disclosure, this study posits that bloggers' product evaluation self-disclosures, social self-disclosures, and blog popularity are key determinants of readers' cognitive and affective trust. Readers' trust in turn should affect their product attitudes and feedback intentions towards the blog. With a survey study involving seven blog articles about dining experience and a structural equation model, this research confirms the positive influences of product evaluation self-disclosures and popularity on readers' cognitive trust and of social self-disclosures on readers' affective trust. Both cognitive and affective forms of trust enhance product attitudes. Affective trust also increases readers' feedback intentions towards the blog. With these findings, this study offers suggestions for bloggers and companies that use blogs as marketing tools.     

The Effects of Anonymity on Self‐Disclosure in Blogs: An Application of the Online Disinhibition Effect

The connections between anonymity and self‐disclosure online have received research attention, but the results have been inconclusive with regard to self‐disclosure in blogs. This quantitative content analysis of 154 personal journal blogs tested some assumptions of the online disinhibition effect in order to examine the effect of types of anonymity on the amount, breadth, and depth of self‐disclosure in blog entries. Results showed that participants disclosed more information in their blog entries when they were more visually identified (sharing a picture of themselves), contrary to the assumptions of the online disinhibition effect. Overall, a trend emerged where visual anonymity led to less disclosiveness, and discursive anonymity (sharing one's real name) led to less disclosiveness for particular types of bloggers.     

Personalized Semantic Based Blog Retrieval

Blog retrieval is a complex task because of the informal language usage.Blogs deviate from the language which is used in traditional corpora largely due to various reasons.Spelling errors,grammatical irregularity,over use of abbreviations and symbolic characters like emotions are a few reasons of irregular corpus blogs.To make the retrieval of blogs easier,the novel idea of personalized semantic based blog retrieval(PSBBR) system is discussed in this paper.The blogs are tagged with a relationship to one another with reference to ontology.The meanings of the blog content and key term are tagged as XML tags.The query term accesses the XML tags to retrieve entire blog content.The system is evaluated with a huge number of blogs extracted from various blog sources.Relevance score is calculated for every blog associated with     

E-impression dimensions

As cyberspace becomes a social space, users are increasingly more interested in how they are presented to others online. Nevertheless, the concept of online impressions has not been defined or empirically verified clearly. The main purpose of the study is to empirically verify a set of measurements for e-impressions, which is defined as impressions formed through interpersonal online interactions in blogs. The measurement should be parsimonious in order to be used efficiently by academics and practitioners. In order to achieve the research goal, three consecutive studies were conducted. In the first study, a large-scale online survey was conducted with 8,836 participants to explore important dimensions of e-impressions from a blog visitor’s point of view. In the second study, in-depth interviews with 52 blog authors were conducted to reorganize the dimensions into a parsimonious set of meta-dimensions from a blog author’s view. Finally, in the third study, a confirmatory factor analysis was conducted through a paper-based survey to verify the meta-dimensions of e-impressions. As the final result, four meta-dimensions of e-impressions consisting of fifteen adjectives were identified, and their validity and reliability were verified. This result will be the basis of developing the system of social network services.     

Understanding the role of gender in bloggers' switching behavior

Blog has become an increasingly popular form of social networking technology in recent years. Many world famous web sites (e.g., Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google) are providing blog services on the Internet. Bloggers, therefore, can easily establish and maintain their blogs through such services. However, research on blogs' adoption and diffusion is rare. In this study, we attempt to study bloggers' post-adoption behaviors. We examine bloggers' intention to switch their blog services by building upon studies in the marketing and IS literature. Particularly, the role of gender is explored and an online survey is conducted to test the research model. Findings confirm that bloggers' intention to switch their blog services is strongly associated with three factors: satisfaction, sunk costs, and attractive alternatives. Meanwhile, moderating effects are found in gender, but not in sunk costs. Implications for both researchers and practitioners are provided.     

Acceptance of blog usage: The roles of technology acceptance,social influence and knowledge sharing motivation

Recently, there has been a dramatic proliferation in the number of blogs; however, little is published about what motivates people to participate in blog activities. Based on the theory of reasoned action, we developed a model involving technology acceptance, knowledge sharing and social influences. A survey of 212 blog participants found strong support for the model. The results indicated that ease of use and enjoyment, and knowledge sharing (altruism and reputation) were positively related to attitude toward blogging, and accounted for 78% of the variance. On the other hand, social factors (community identification) and attitude toward blogging significantly influenced a blog participant's intention to continue to use blogs. Together they explain 83% of the variance of intention to blog.     

Towards a framework for educational affordances of blogs

Accompanying the emergence of blog technology as a dominant online publishing paradigm is a growing interest in its educational benefits and applications. This study sets out to develop an empirically grounded framework for educational blogging in the context of teacher education. A working framework was first proposed that highlights four areas: self-expression, self-reflection, social interaction, and reflective dialogue. An exploratory study was then conducted to examine the framework by involving two groups of student teachers during their teaching practice. This study revealed that the salient values of blogs centered on emotionally charged and social-oriented individual expressions as well as self-reflection. The interactive functionality of blogs was used mostly for exchanging social support rather than reflective dialogue. A new dimension – blog-reading – has emerged through the investigation and been added to the original framework. The findings can contribute to a better understanding of the educational values of blogs and their meaningful applications as educational media.     

Making Marketing Work for Your Library Blog

ABSTRACT

Library blogs offer a compelling means of reaching out to patrons and engaging them in conversation. However, even the most well-written blog can suffer for lack of an audience if not marketed properly. The marketing concept and the related marketing mix provide useful frameworks for planning and implementing blog projects to give them the best chances of being read by the intended patrons. This article will describe the marketing concept and marketing mix and explain how these ideas can be successfully applied to any library blog endeavor.     

Who is talking? An ontology-based opinion leader identification framework for word-of-mouth marketing in online social blogs

Online social blogs have gained popularity recently. They provide an effective channel for word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing to promote products or service. In WoM marketing, an opinion leader, who is normally more interconnected and has a higher social standing, can deliver product information, provide recommendations, give personal comments, and supplement professional knowledge that help companies to promote their products. Many theories have been put forward about social networks, but few address the issue of opinion leader identification. This study proposes a framework to identify opinion leaders using the information retrieved from blog content, authors, readers, and their relationships, which we call BARR for short. We first build ontology for a marketing product and then collect parameters from BARR to identify “hot topics” related to the product. These hot topics are then associated with information disseminators, or opinion leaders. Marketers can use BARR to track blogs written by opinion leaders and identify their opinions to form effective marketing strategies.     

基于统计数据的微博表情符分析及其在情绪分析中的应用

表情符作为一种新兴的网络语言,受到了越来越多的微博用户的青睐。微博中出现的表情符形象直观地表达了博主的情绪,对情绪分析起着至关重要的作用。首先对大量中文微博中表情符的使用特点、分布情况和情绪表达特点进行了统计分析。然后,人工选取具有代表性且情感倾向明确的表情符作为六类基本情绪的种子表情符。根据目标表情符和六类情绪的种子表情符在微博文本中的共现情况,为其建立六维情绪向量,并将其应用于微博情绪分析。在两个数据集上的实验结果表明,本文建立的表情符情绪向量有效地提高了微博情绪识别的精度。     

Rzeczpospolita blogów [Republic of Blog]: Examining Polish Bloggers Through Content Analysis

While researchers are increasingly interested in understanding the social context of weblogs, or blogs, most existing studies rely on analysis of English-language content. This study is a quantitative content analysis of Polish blogs ( N =358) aimed at understanding the content elements and user-initiated features, such as hyperlinks, of blogs under the theoretical framework of uses and gratifications. Results indicate that self-expression is the primary motivation for blog posts. Furthermore, Polish bloggers appear to be driven more by self-expression than by social interaction motivations. Additional findings explored the relationship among motivations, gender, and topics discussed in blogs.     

A tag-topic model for blog mining

Blog mining addresses the problem of mining information from blog data. Although mining blogs may share many similarities to Web and text documents, existing techniques need to be reevaluated and adapted for the multidimensional representation of blog data, which exhibit dimensions not present in traditional documents, such as tags. Blog tags are semantic annotations in blogs which can be valuable sources of additional labels for the myriad of blog documents. In this paper, we present a tag-topic model for blog mining, which is based on the Author-Topic model and Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The tag-topic model determines the most likely tags and words for a given topic in a collection of blog posts. The model has been successfully implemented and evaluated on real-world blog data.     

Developing network indicators for ideological landscapes from the political blogosphere in South Korea

This paper investigates hyperlink patterns in the South Korean political blogosphere. Using sampling from the blog sidebar hyperlinks of elected politicians (National Assemblymen), the top 79 elite citizen blogs were selected. Two data sets were manually compiled during January, 2007: (a) links between politicians and citizens, and (b) links amongst citizens. A variety of social network analytical methods were then applied. The results show that more top blogs have reciprocal links with politicians than have unidirectional links. The structure of hyperlink interconnectivity suggests that the ruling Uri party affiliated blogs are key in the blog network. For example, the blogs tied with the Uri party have a higher centrality and are more densely connected. Network diagrams also suggest that the top blogs are polarized by party. However, some blogs are located at the center of the Uri and GNP clusters and are connected to both camps. In other words, there are a number of citizen blogs that link to both the Uri and GNP members, because their political identities are not completely shaped but also remain between 2 different ideologies. This suggests that binary opposition in online political discourse is slowly changing.     

ConVis: A Visual Text Analytic System for Exploring Blog Conversations

Today it is quite common for people to exchange hundreds of comments in online conversations (e.g., blogs). Often, it can be very difficult to analyze and gain insights from such long conversations. To address this problem, we present a visual text analytic system that tightly integrates interactive visualization with novel text mining and summarization techniques to fulfill information needs of users in exploring conversations. At first, we perform a user requirement analysis for the domain of blog conversations to derive a set of design principles. Following these principles, we present an interface that visualizes a combination of various metadata and textual analysis results, supporting the user to interactively explore the blog conversations. We conclude with an informal user evaluation, which provides anecdotal evidence about the effectiveness of our system and directions for further design.     

CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION AND CLASSIFICATION FROM BLOGS BY USING DATA MINING: AN EXAMPLE OF VOIP PHONE

Blogs have been considered the 4th Internet application that can cause radical changes in the world, after e-mail, instant messaging, and Bulletin Board System (BBS). Many Internet users rely heavily on them to express their emotions and personal comments on whatever topics interest them. Nowadays, blogs have become the popular media and could be viewed as new marketing channels. Depending on the blog search engine, Technorati, we tracked about 94 million blogs in August 2007. It also reported that a whole new blog is created every 7.4 seconds and 275,000 blogs are updated daily. These figures can be used to illustrate the reason why more and more companies attempt to discover useful knowledge from this vast number of blogs for business purposes. Therefore, blog mining could be a new trend of web mining. The major objective of this study is to present a structure that includes unsupervised (self-organizing map) and supervised learning methods (back-propagation neural networks, decision tree, and support vector machines) for extracting knowledge from blogs, namely, a blog mining (BM) model. Moreover, a real case regarding VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone products is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Communication Communities or “CyberGhettos?”: A Path Analysis Model Examining Factors that Explain Selective Exposure to Blogs1

This study used an online panel of Internet users to examine the degree to which blog users practice selective exposure when seeking political information. The research employed a path analysis model to explore the extent to which exposure to offline and online discussion of political issues, and offline and online media use, as well as political variables and demographic factors, predict an individual's likelihood to engage in selective exposure to blogs. The findings indicate that respondents did practice selective exposure to blogs, predominantly those who are heavy blog users, politically active both online and offline, partisan, and highly educated.