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Longitudinal Content Analysis of Weblogs, 2003-2004

Our piece, "Longitudinal Content Analysis of Weblogs, 2003-2004", has been published in the new book Blogging, Citizenship and the Future of Media, edited by Mark Tremayne.

You can find a preprint copy of our chapter, as usual, in the sidebar.

Recent additions to the BROG research team

The BROG project is pleased to welcome two new members this fall: Ben Clark and Sharon Stoerger. Ben is interested in issues of online community, especially in LiveJournal. Sharon's research interests include the use of blogs in online learning. Both are doctoral students in SLIS.

Also, Irene Ramos, a postdoc at IU's Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, is a visitor to BROG this year. Irene has been working on political blogs and e-democracy in Spain and Portugal. She has a doctorate in political science and sociology from Madrid.

Welcome, all!

BROG Paper Updates

I've added a large chunk of BROG's recent work to the sidebar of the blog. We'd (or, perhaps, "I'd"...) been a bit lax about making sure that things there were up to date - so I tacked on a set of slides and papers from the last six or seven months of research.

We hope you enjoy them!

The BROG brand

Since everyone else is posting it, we might as well make it official. BROG now has a logo and a t-shirt.

Investment in research, anyone?

Lois noted earlier today that BROG's favorite research tool blo.gs is for sale. Pete suggests:

BROG should buy it, hack it to do what we need (including starting the random blog feature back up), and make it all available under a CC license.

That's not an entirely crazy idea. It would be one way to ensure that a very useful service continues to be available. And it could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But who would maintain it? What would be involved?

Happy (belated) Birthday, BROG!

Just over two years ago (February 12, 2003, to be precise) the BROG project met for the first time. Its original members were Sabrina Bonus, Lois Scheidt, Elijah Wright, and myself. Inspired by Diane Squire, who was into blogs before most people in SLIS had heard of them, we got together to do one simple study -- a content analysis of random blogs, in order to characterize the emergent weblog genre. (See Diane's article about it in SLIS News from Spring 2003 -- Yes that IS a frog -- photoshopped -- on Lois's shoulder.) It was low-hanging fruit at a time when almost no serious scholarship on blogs existed. Since then, blog scholarship -- and blogging -- have expanded. And we've acquired a taste for the fruit, and are willing to climb higher to find it -- to the point of hand-coding nearly 6000 blogs for a link analysis study last year, just to be able to characterize with confidence one small corner of the blogosphere. Two years later, the BROG project lives on, an informal but durable collaboration with more research ideas than we have the time and resources to develop, even with our present expanded membership. Who would have thought we'd still be at it? :-)

Broggers @ Sunbelt

Various members of BROG have just returned from the Sunbelt Social Networks conference in Redondo Beach, California, sponsored by the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) as well as USC, UC Irvine, and UCLA.

Presentations by BROG members were as follows:

Social Network Dynamics in the Blogosphere (PPT)

Mood, Music And Friends: Mapping The Culture Of LiveJournal (PPT)

Revolutionary Vanguard Or Echo Chamber? Political Blogs And The Mainstream Media (PPT)

We hope that everyone enjoys the slides - these projects are currently "in process" and will develop further in the coming months.

BROG has visitors

The BROG project was visited today by bloggers and knowledge management specialists Lilia Efimova and Denham Grey. Lilia is en route from HICSS to the Netherlands via Chicago and Indianapolis (where she met up with Denham), and they decided to drive down to Bloomington to spend the day with us. Lilia gave an interesting presentation of the recent and ongoing blog research she and her collaborators in Europe have been doing. Then we all ate sushi and talked blogs (and a few other topics besides) at Susan and John's house. A day well spent!

BROG at HICSS

BROG members John Paolillo and Lois Scheidt are on the Big Island of Hawai'i, where they will present "Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis 'From the Bottom Up'" at the 38th Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences. The presentation will take place at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, January 6. The paper, co-authored by eight BROG members, has been nominated for a HICSS Best Paper Prize.

Evaluating the popular view that weblogs are highly interlinked and mutually interactive ("conversational"), the paper presents evidence from a hand-coded sample of 5,517 public weblogs that blogs form cliques of dense interconnection in some topic domains but are largely non-interacting. The research, which employed social network analysis, information visualization, and discourse analysis techniques, was carried out during the spring and summer of 2004.

BROG paper nominated for Edublog award

BROG's first publication, "Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs", has been nominated as the "best blogged [sic] paper" of 2004. The awards are being sponsored by "the incsub association: free-for-teachers hosting support and community in using weblogs, wikis and open source CMSs". There are nominations in 10 categories. The entire poll can be reached at: http://incsub.org/association/poll.

The paper reports the results of a content analysis of a random sample of weblogs and was the first to provide a descriptive snapshot of ordinary blogs. It was made available as a preprint on this blog in October 2003, and published in the Proceedings of the Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) in January 2004. The HICSS publication, along with an expanded version entitled "Weblogs as a Bridging Genre" scheduled for publication in the journal Information, Technology & People, is available for download from the sidebar. The Into the Blogosphere collection (in which BROG's paper "Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs" appears) was also nominated in the category of "best overall group blog", and the weblog of BROG member Lois Scheidt was nominated as "best research-based blog".