Expressing Social Relationships on the Blog through Links and Comments

June 25, 2007 – San Jose, CA

2007 Summer Hard Problem Program (SHARP)

Noor Ali-HasanMicrosoft

Research conducted with Prof. Lada Adamic, University of Michigan School of Information

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)

Blogs

blogroll

number of comments

blog posts

citations

Blogrolls

Blog Comments

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

Community Structure

Three Blog Communities

San Jose KuwaitBlogs

UAEBlogs

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

DFW Blogs

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

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 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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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 2First met in person but now communicate with F2F, phone, email, or IM

5 4 3

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

Blogs in a National Crisis

Kuwait in January 2006

Image sources: http://www.kuwaitinfo.org.uk and http://news.bbc.co.uk

Visualization of Blog Post Topics

Blogs and Decentralized Information Sharing

• I'm a student in the United States and many of the blogs in Kuwait Blogs community keep me updated with what's going on in Kuwait and they are more informative and up to date than newspapers.

Kuwait 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• Blogs used to make sense of a

national crisis

Questions?

For more information:

Noor Ali-HasanMicrosoft1065 La Avenida StreetMountain View, CA 94043

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