Inproceedings,
Finding "the life between buildings": An approach for defining a weblog community
Internet Research 6.0: Internet Generations, Association of Internet Researchers, (October 2005)
Abstract
Although weblogs are perceived as low-threshold tools to publish on-line, empowering individual expression in public, there is growing evidence of social structures evolving around weblogs and their influence on norms and practices of blogging. This evidence ranges from voices of bloggers themselves speaking about the social effects of blogging, to studies on specific weblog communities with distinct cultures (e.g. knitting community described by Wei (2004), or goth community described by Hodkinson (2004)), to mathematical analysis of links between weblogs indicating that community formation in the blogosphere is not a random process, but an indication of shared interests binding bloggers together (Kumar, Novak, Raghaven, & Tomkins, 2003). Weblog communities are not only interesting as a case of online community supported by yet another technology. Weblogs provide spaces for both emergence of social ecosystem, and individual expression and control; hence providing insights of interplays between levels of networked individuals (Wellman, 2002), network structures and community properties. In comparison with many other types of online communities (e.g. those forming around forums or chats rooms), weblog communities emerge from connections between weblogs and their authors, and not around a single shared space. Bloggers' communal spaces seem to emerge between weblogs, like in a city where life between buildings accounts for many of the social activities of its inhabitants (Gehl, 2001). As in cities, blogger communal spaces are not evenly distributed: some neighbourhoods are full of social activities and conversations, while others look like a random collocation of houses where inhabitants have nothing in common. Blogger communal spaces may have visible boundaries (e.g. NetRing for knitting blogger community (Wei, 2004)), but more often indicators of a community are subtle and are difficult for a non-member to distinguish. Just as a local garden is not likely to have a sign indicating that there is a chess-player community that inhabits it every Sunday, blog communities do not delineate obvious community boundaries. It is here that the researcher faces very specific problems: where to start looking for a weblog community and which indicators to look for. The purpose of this paper is to get an insight into methods of finding "life between buildings": virtual settlements where weblog communities reside. As a theoretical lens we use Jones' (1997) theory of virtual settlement which argues against equating virtual communities with the cyber-places (e.g. IRC channel or web-based forum) they inhabit. Jones compares virtual community research to archaeology and suggests studying a community through the artefacts of its virtual settlement. In case of weblog communities, it is usually difficult to find a single shared space (virtual settlement) as a point of departure, so we suggest an iterative approach. One can start from weak clues indicating the likelihood of a community presence and assumptions about norms and practices in it. These would indicate where to start data collection, which weblogs to include in the analysis, what artefacts to look for and how to interpret them in order to define boundaries of the community virtual settlement. While the virtual settlement is being uncovered, researchers could encounter new types of artefacts, develop a better understanding of community norms and practices, and adjust methods for data collection and interpretation. In this paper we try out a suggested iterative approach to map a community broadly defined as "knowledge management bloggers community". We propose a set of indicators of weblog community presence, discuss the alternatives of mapping the community based on those indicators and then select most promising for further examination. We use social network analysis to compare and contrast two views on the community: one based on linking patterns in text of weblogs and another based on bloggers regular reading lists. Based on our results we discuss implications for research on weblogs and online communities. References Gehl, J. (2001). Life between buildings: using public space. (5th ed.) Danish Architectural Press. Hodkinson, P. (2004). Subcultural blogging? Individual, community and communication. Presented at AOIR Annual Conference: IR 5.0: Ubiquity, Sussex, September 2004.. Kumar, R., Novak, J., Raghaven, P., & Tomkins, A. (2003). On the bursty evolution of blogspace. In Proceedings of the twelfth international conference on World Wide Web (pp. 568-576). Budapest, Hungary. Wei, C. (2004). Formation of Norms in a Blog Community. In L.Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the Blogosphere; Rhetoric, Community and Culture of Weblogs. University of Minnesota. Wellman, B. (2002). Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism. In Makoto Tanabe, Peter van den Besselaar, & Toru Ishida (Eds.), Digital Cities II: Computational and Sociological Approaches (pp. 11-25). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
