Expressing Social Relationships on the Blog through Links and Comments

March 27, 2007 - Boulder, CO

International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

Noor Ali-HasanMicrosoft

Lada AdamicSchool of InformationUniversity of Michigan

Introduction

• Keeping a blog continues to be a popular online activity

• Blogging is an extremely social activity– Bloggers receive and leave comments

about posts– Bloggers list other blogs on their blogrolls– Bloggers link to other blogs in their posts

(citations)

Research Questions

• Do blog networks emerge due to blogging or do they represent real life social networks?

• Do blogs help facilitate the formation of new friendships or do they help preserve existing relationships in the real world?

• Do blog comments and blogroll links represent different levels of relationship intimacy?

Related Work

• McKenna et al. (2002) observed that close online relationships naturally progress to face-to-face interactions

• Nardi et al. (2004) found that many start blogging at the urging of friends and continue to blog to avoid disappointing their readers

Related Work

• Adamic and Glance (2005) analyzed network structure of political blogs during the 2004 U.S. Presidential election

• Herring et al. (2005) studied the interconnectedness of the blogosphere

• Marlow (2005) conducted a large scale survey of blogs

Community Structure

Three Blog Communities

DFW Blogs KuwaitBlogs

UAEBlogs

image source: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/

Boulder

Data Collection Methods

• Collected blogroll links by hand• Used BlogPulse and Technorati for

in-post citations• Gathered comments manually over a

two week period just for Kuwait

Q8 UAE DFW

Number of Blogs 152 65 365

comment links

blogroll links

in-post links

664

131

325

143

2548

98

Link Type Overlap for Kuwait Blogs

Density and Centralization

Q8 UAE DFW

citation 2.08 1.37 0.37

blogroll 6.25 2.65 1.79

comment 5.10 N/A N/A

centralization of the combined blogroll and post citations network

indegree centralization 0.18 0.30 0.04

outdegree centralization 0.30 0.67 0.55

Within-Community Blogroll and Citation Links

DFW UAE Kuwait

Reciprocity

Kuwait UAE DFW

post citations 19% 16% 26%

blogroll links 32% 43% 27%

comments 43% N/A N/A

Community Structure

Kuwait UAE DFW

maximum modularity 0.24 0.22 0.53

number of communities at maximum modularity

7 6 10

Community Boundaries

DFW

UAE

Kuwait

Porosity of Community Boundaries

Kuwait UAE DFW

internal post citations received 79% 24% 16%

internal blogroll links given 47% 22% 9%

non-anonymous comments received from bloggers within community

42% N/A N/A

Online and Offline Relationships

Survey Methods

• Conducted online survey• Most notified via email• Kuwait Blogs and UAE Blogs blogged

about survey on central sites

Q8 UAE DFWNumber of Respondents 85 38 67Response Rate 63% 68% 23%

Motivation Behind Blogging

DFW Kuwait UAE

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rce

nta

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0.0

0.4

0.8

1.2

expressiononline journalinspired by friend's blogfind new friendsshare news w/ friends & family

Motivation Behind Blogging

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.

DFW Blogs Survey Respondent

Intersection of Blogging and Offline Relationships

Q8 UAE DFW

Few or none of the comments received are left by people known offline

79% 81% 66%

Few or none of the comments left on other blogs are on blogs of people known offline

74% 94% 65%

Using Blogs to Sustain Real-Life Relationships with Non-Bloggers

Q8 UAE DFW

Few or none of the comments received are left by people who do not blog but whom they know offline

99% 94% 79%

Using Blogs to Maintain and Form Relationships

Median number of bloggers listed on blogroll and:

Q8 UAE DFW

Met in person 5 5 2Emailed 5 10 12IM’ed 6 2.5 2

Using Blogs to Maintain and Form RelationshipsMost of the Kuwaiti bloggers know

one another, either directly (friends/relatives) or indirectly (friends of friends, friend's relatives, etc.). If they don't know one another, then they don't remain strangers for long. […] I know of several people who used their blogs to make new friends in Kuwait.

Kuwait Blogs Survey Respondent

Using Blogs to Maintain and Form RelationshipsThe DFW Blogs community was an

incredible social network for me. I had recently moved back to the Dallas area when the group began. Through that group I was able to meet highly intelligent, talented, motivated, and creative people. We all had a common interest - blogs - but we were all so diverse. The group was amazing and I'm so thankful I was apart of it for so many years.

DFW Blogs Survey Respondent

Conclusions

• Blogs enable relationship formation• Blog relationships extend to other

communication methods and F2F• At this time, blogs are not used to

sustain real life relationships• All three communities show high

degrees of reciprocity and cohesion

Questions?

For more information:

Noor Ali-HasanMicrosoft1065 La Avenida StreetMountain View, CA 94043

(650) 693-1925noor.ali-hasan@microsoft.comhttp://www.noor.bz/

Lada AdamicSchool of InformationUniversity of Michigan1085 South University AvenueAnn Arbor, MI 48109

(734) 615-2132ladamic@umich.eduhttp://www-personal.umich.edu/~ladamic