Why do women write personal blogs? Satisfying needs for self-disclosure and affiliation tell part of the story

Hierarchical OLS regression of survey results from a random sample of 312 women bloggers reveals a statistically significant positive relationship between need for self-disclosure and seeing blogging as a way to express one’s own voice, mediated by need for affiliation and time spent blogging. In essence, women with a strong need to self-disclose information about themselves are more likely than other women to say they blog to express their own voice in the blogosphere, compared with blogging to connect with other people or to gain influence in the blogosphere. In contrast, for women who blog to connect with other people or gain influence in the blogosphere, the strongest predictors is time spent blogging, not needs that motivated them to blog. Results are discussed in relation to need theory.     

Bloggers and Readers Blogging Together: Collaborative Co-creation of Political Blogs

A significant amount of research has focused on blogs, bloggers, and blogging. However, relatively little work has examined blog readers, their interactions with bloggers, or their impact on blogging. This paper presents a qualitative study focusing specifically on readers of political blogs to develop a better understanding of readers?? interactions with blogs and bloggers. This is the first such study to examine the same blogging activity from both readers?? and bloggers?? perspectives. Readers?? significance and contributions to blogs are examined through a number of themes, including: community membership and participation; the relationship between political ideology, reading habits, and political participation; and differences and similarities between mainstream media (MSM) and blogs. Based on these analyses, this paper argues that blogging is not only a social activity, but is a collaborative process of co-creation in which both bloggers and readers engage. Implications of this finding contribute to the study and understanding of reader participation, to the design of technologies for bloggers and blog readers, and to the development of theoretical understandings of social media.     

Who blogs? Personality predictors of blogging

The Big Five personality inventory measures personality based on five key traits: neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and conscientiousness [Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Normal personality assessment in clinical practice: The NEO Personality Inventory. Psychological Assessment 4, 5–13]. There is a growing body of evidence indicating that individual differences on the Big Five factors are associated with different types of Internet usage [Amichai-Hamburger, Y., & Ben-Artzi, E. (2003). Loneliness and Internet use. Computers in Human Behavior 19, 71–80; Hamburger, Y. A., & Ben-Artzi, E. (2000). Relationship between extraversion and neuroticism and the different uses of the Internet. Computers in Human Behavior 16, 441–449]. Two studies sought to extend this research to a relatively new online format for expression: blogging. Specifically, we examined whether the different Big Five traits predicted blogging. The results of two studies indicate that people who are high in openness to new experience and high in neuroticism are likely to be bloggers. Additionally, the neuroticism relationship was moderated by gender indicating that women who are high in neuroticism are more likely to be bloggers as compared to those low in neuroticism whereas there was no difference for men. These results indicate that personality factors impact the likelihood of being a blogger and have implications for understanding who blogs.     

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.     

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.     

Blogging privacy management rule development: The impact of self-monitoring skills,concern for appropriateness,and blogging frequency

The current study utilized communication privacy management (CPM) theory to examine how individuals’ blogging privacy management rules are related to their communication-based personality dispositions (self-monitoring skills and concern for enacting socially appropriate interactions). The study also explored relationships between the same dispositions and blogging frequency. Overall, 356 bloggers completed an online survey instrument. Regression analysis provided support for both hypotheses. Bloggers with higher self-monitoring skills had a more private orientation towards their blogging privacy management practices. Bloggers’ CFA level was related to more public and open blogging permeability rules. High self-monitors and high CFA dispositions were positively related to blogging frequency. Implications of the study to current computer-mediated communication (CMC) theory and research are discussed.     

Finding the top influential bloggers based on productivity and popularity features

A blog acts as a platform of virtual communication to share comments or views about products, events and social issues. Like other social web activities, blogging actions spread to a large number of people. Users influence others in many ways, such as buying a product, having a particular political or social opinion or initiating new activity. Finding the top influential bloggers is an active research domain as it helps us in various fields, such as online marketing, e-commerce, product search and e-advertisements. There exist various models to find the influential bloggers, but they consider limited features using non-modular approach. This paper proposes a new model, Popularity and Productivity Model (PPM), based on a modular approach to find the top influential bloggers. It consists of popularity and productivity modules which exploit various features. We discuss the role of each proposed and existing features and evaluate the proposed model against the standard baseline models using datasets from the real-world blogs. The analysis using standard performance evaluation measures verifies that both productivity and popularity modules play a vital role to find influential bloggers in blogging community in an effective manner.     

Does Blogging Empower Women? Exploring the Role of Agency and Community

Two studies explored the relationship between blogging and psychological empowerment among women. First, a survey (N = 340) revealed that personal journaling empowers users by inducing a strong sense of community whereas filter blogging does so by enhancing their sense of agency. Various user motivations were also shown to predict psychological empowerment. Next, a 2 (type of blog) X 2 (comments) X 2 (site visits) factorial experiment (N = 214) found that 2 site metrics—the number of site visits and number of comments—affect psychological empowerment through distinct mechanisms—the former through the sense of agency and the latter through the sense of community. These metrics are differentially motivating for bloggers depending on the type of blog maintained: filter or personal.     

Uniting Political Bloggers in Diversity: Collective Identity and Web Activism

In contrast to the common view of blogging as a highly narcissistic activity, this study explicates how blogging is a communal activity and the emergence of a collective identity which drives collective action. 41 interviews with activist and nonactivist bloggers revealed that shared consciousness, distinctive blogging practices, and the articulation of a common adversary contribute to the development of a collective identity. Furthermore, identity multiplexity points to the emergence of “individualized collectiveness,” which extends beyond networked individualism and is reinforced by offline participation in activism and pre‐existing social ties with other activists.     

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.     

Blogging for ICT4D: reflecting and engaging with peers to build development discourse

Information and Communication Technology‐enabled Development (ICT4D) discourse relies upon the idea that ICTs can foster development in particular by encouraging wider participation in development initiatives. In this paper, we question how the blogging practices of development professionals shape such ICT4D discourse. Through a combination of interviews and analyses of blog contents, we examine two major purposes of blogging: reflecting upon development practices and engaging with a self‐selected audience. Our analyses reveal that these two purposes were interwoven in ways that contributed to making bloggers' ICT4D discourse innovative but oriented towards a small community of peers rather than a larger audience. Through blogging, development professionals refined their expertise on ICT4D. As they did so, they also generated a personal speaker's corner that primarily attracted like‐minded peers rather than promoting larger participation in ICT4D discourse. This research contributes to the emerging literature on social media practices by showing how blogging practices enable the formation of what a discourse is about, and by highlighting differences between perceived and actual levels of interactions between bloggers and their audience. The paper also adds to the ICT and development literatures by revealing that blogging practices can deepen ICT4D discourse, but that they do not necessarily enhance participation in development. Such insight is crucial for development professionals to develop realistic expectations of blogging for ICT4D.     

How do open source communities blog?

We report on an exploratory study, which aims at understanding how software communities use blogs compared to conventional development infrastructures. We analyzed the behavior of 1,100 bloggers in four large open source communities, distinguishing between committing bloggers and other community members. We observed that these communities intensively use blogs with one new entry every 8 h. A blog entry includes 14 times more words than a commit message. When analyzing the content of the blogs, we found that committers and others bloggers write about similar topics. Most popular topics in committers’ blogs represent high-level concepts such as features and domain concepts, while source code related topics are discussed in 15% of their posts. Other community members frequently write about community events and conferences as well as configuration and deployment topics. We found that the blogging peak period is usually after the software is released. Moreover, committers are more likely to blog after corrective engineering than after forward engineering and re-engineering activities. Our findings call for a hypothesis-driven research to (a) further understand the role of social media in dissolving the collaboration boundaries between developers and other stakeholders and (b) integrate social media into development processes and tools.     

Filter Blogs vs. Personal Journals: Understanding the Knowledge Production Gap on the Internet

Blog is currently a popular form of knowledge production on the Internet. Research shows that relatively few bloggers produce "filter blogs," which focus on political knowledge. Most bloggers produce personal journals. This study uses national survey data to determine whether and why people have differential knowledge production in the form of different blogs. As knowledge is a critical indicator of social power, this research also examines whether blogs with different levels of political knowledge demonstrate unequal social power. Results show that bloggers with higher socioeconomic status contribute more filter blogs than lower-status segments. Even among filter bloggers, socioeconomic status, gender, and print-media use are associated with social influence. These findings suggest that a knowledge production gap merits more scholarly attention.     

Applying an intelligent notification mechanism to blogging systems utilizing a genetic-based information retrieval approach

Blogging systems have received a lot of attention in recent years due to their wide spectrum of applications. The comment function is a significant part of a blog application, which can be used to gather the readers’ feedback and produce social interactions with them. However, most of the existing blogging systems only provide simple comment notification mechanisms for bloggers. Since a popular blog may receive thousands of comments in a short period of time, it is almost impossible for the notification mechanism to inform the blogger about every comment, even meaningful ones. In this paper, we propose a Two-stage Intelligent Notification Mechanism (TINM) for blogging systems to carry out intelligent comment notification, so that the blogger only receives meaningful comments. To reduce the computation cost in the keyword retrieval, a Genetic-based Information Retrieval Approach (GIRA) was designed. Experimental results show that the proposed approach reduces the computation cost during keyword retrieval, and still leads to near optimal results.     

Personal journal bloggers: Profiles of disclosiveness

Personal journal blogs, which are primarily about bloggers’ selves and inner states, are often characterized by high amounts of self-disclosure. This study employed the uses and gratifications perspective to reveal the characteristics of disclosive personal journal bloggers. Path analyses of data from an online survey revealed that the most disclosive bloggers were women who were generally disclosive in their offline lives as well. Disclosive bloggers were typically motivated to blog to archive and organize their thoughts, much as one would expect for an online diary. Target audience was a stronger predictor of disclosiveness than the potential audience. The theoretical and practical implications of study results are discussed, along with potential directions for future research.     

Weblog success: Exploring the role of technology

Weblogs have recently gained considerable media attention. Leading weblog sites are already attracting millions of visitors. Yet, success in the highly competitive world of weblogs is not easily achieved. This study seeks to explore weblog success from a technology perspective, i.e. from the impact of weblog-building technology (or blogging tool). Based on an examination of 126 highly successful weblogs tracked over a period of 3 months, we categorized weblogs in terms of popularity rank and growth, and evaluated the relationship between weblog success (in terms of popularity) and technology use. Our analysis indicates that weblog success is associated with the type of blogging tool used. We argue that technology characteristics affect the presentation and organization of weblog content, as well as the social interaction between bloggers, and in turn, affect weblog success or popularity improvement. Based on this analysis, we propose a techno-social success model for weblogs. This model postulates that a weblog's success is mainly associated with its ability to provide value for its users and readers at the content, the technology, and the social levels.     

What makes blogging attractive to bloggers: a case of college‐level constituency users

This study presents a new perspective to facilitate learner‐centred weblog evaluation, based on content attractiveness, blogging support, and the value‐added service construct. A mixed method, combining fishbone diagram, fuzzy logic techniques, and the analytic hierarchy process, was conducted to identify further the criteria that attract bloggers to engage in blogging, based on user perspectives in a higher education context. Results indicate that the dimensions of content attractiveness and value‐added service for the benefit of students contributed two‐thirds of the overall weights. Respondents' appreciating a pleasant atmosphere is the first priority. Findings also indicated both similarities and differences among freshmen, non‐freshmen, and instructors and provide a valuable reference for various types of learning resources. This study made two contributions to research. First, the extracted weight values of the critical factors from the proposed hierarchical system framework serve as guidelines for enhancing the robustness and attractiveness of weblog content. Second, the evaluation process provided insights for managing weblog quality effectiveness to promote joyful interactions while exhibiting mutual connections.     

Bloggers’ Responses to the Snowden Affair: Combining Automated and Manual Methods in the Analysis of News Blogging

The Snowden affair gave rise to a huge public debate about not only the legitimacy of the secret surveillance programs he revealed but also about Snowden himself and about the accuracy of the information he leaked. In this paper we present an analysis of how the affair was discussed in the English language blogosphere, based on a corpus of 15,000 blog posts written about Snowden and published from June 2013 to June 2014, as a sub-corpus of a larger corpus of 100,000 blog posts on the topic of surveillance, written during the period 2006–2014. Automated tools are used to identify the topics that characterize the blogging about surveillance and the posts about the Snowden affair. Through an in-depth analysis of the blog posts that commented on Snowden’s revelations of the PRISM program for surveillance of social media users, we chart how bloggers responded to Snowden and his role in this disclosure, whether they found the information credible, and the extent to which they expressed criticism of the surveillance practices. The analysis is used as a basis for discussing the role of blogs in the civic engagement during the first phase of the Snowden affair.     

(Russian) Writer‐Bloggers: Digital Perfection and the Aesthetics of Imperfection

This article explores readings of (micro)blogging services as outlets for playful, “imperfect” language. Adopting a transcultural approach, it examines a blog category that has attracted scarce academic attention to date: the creative worker's blog. Through a qualitative analysis of metalinguistic statements by 14 Russian writer‐bloggers, the author tests 2 interdependent hypotheses: (H1) through metalinguistic statements and pragmatic strategies, writers present language play and “imperfect” language as prototypical for new media; and (H2) If H1 is correct, the writer‐blogger's preference for “imperfect” language caters into a broader cultural‐philosophical anxiety – one of foregrounding imperfection as an aesthetic counterresponse to digital perfection.