>> Danyel Fisher: I'm honored today to have Eric Baumer joining us from
University of Irvine, California. His dissertation work is on computational
metaphors, different interesting area but here he's going to be reflecting on the
last couple years of research he's been doing on blogs and blog reading that
started off while a Microsoft intern working with me and is now joining us today to
talk about blog reading and blog readers. I'd like to welcome Eric Baumer. Eric.
>> Eric Baumer: Thanks, Danyel. As Danyel said I'm coming from the University
of California, Irvine. The research that I'm going to be talking about today was
conducted in the social code group there under the supervision of Bill Tomlinson.
It was also in large part with an undergrad researcher named Mark Suyoshi
(phonetic).
And the basic gist of what we're looking at is that there's been a significant
amount of research on blogs and blogging and social network analysis of blogs
but not so much research actually focusing on readers of blogs and how people
read.
So this is sort of trying to explore the other side of blogging. I'll start off with as
Danyel mentioned, a project that I did here as an intern in the summer of 2006
called the Smarter Blogroll. From that I'll move on to talking about an exploratory
study that we did of blog reading and blog reading practices that was recently
presented as a paper at Kie (phonetic). And I'll wrap up with a study that we
actually just completed focusing on people who read political blogs.
So the Smarter Blogroll and this was presented earlier this year in a paper at the
Hicks Conference in the social spaces mini track. We started off with this idea of
sort of ambient chatter or the zite guys trying to capture what are the current hot
topics that people are talking about.
If you want to talk about the entire Blogsphere, then there are things like
technolady tag clouds (phonetic) and other tools that capture it for sort of
everything. But there aren't really tools that are specifically aimed at what are the
blogs I read talking about, what are the people in whom I -- in whose opinions I'm
interested, what do they think is cool right now. And so we developed this tool
called the Smarter Blogroll that is essentially socially scoped topic extraction. It's
applying a really simple TF IDF weighted bigrams and trigrams to an individual's
blogroll. And you can see over here a screen cap of the tool itself. You have just
like in a traditional blogroll individuals blogs, Alabama and proper, Althouse, et
cetera.
Underneath those, those are augmented with lists of automatically identified
topics. Let's say someone was interested in this mystery guest blogger topic on
Alabama and proper. They click on that and then they can go directly to posts
about that topic. And this was designed specifically with two tasks in mind. One
of them is the monitoring my list task looking at the list of blogs that I read in
keeping up with them.
The other task that we had in mind is sort of understanding another person's list.
If I come across a new blog and I see the blogroll down the side and it's a whole
bunch of alien names that I've never heard before, that doesn't tell me a lot about
that blog or that person's interests. With this you can quickly skim through the list
of topics and get a sort of general idea of what that person is interested in. So to
evaluate this, we did a user study where we took two sample blogrolls, and these
were taken from actual blogs, and hand generated a list of topics for those
blogrolls.
For each blogroll we came up with ten actual topics that were actually discussed
in post somewhere on the blogrolls as well as 20 distractors. And the task that
we gave people was to sort of skim through this blogroll over the course of ten
minutes and then identify which out of these 30 topics were actually discussed in
that blogroll. Participants were then scored on the number of correct hits, the
number of correct topics that they accurately identified as well as false positives,
the number of things that they thought were talked about but actually were not. A
simple two-by-two study design where we varied which blogroll they saw first and
whether they had the smarter blogroll first or the classic blogroll first.
As far as the results, there was an overwhelmingly significant result that people
thought it was much easier, it was a much easier task to get an impression of
these blogrolls with the tool as well as far more enjoyable.
What was also interesting is that when we asked them if the topics that they saw
were actually informative, people thought that they were if they saw the smarter
blogroll first. And we hypothesized that there's a sort of disappointment effect
going on here in both directions.
If you start with the Smarter Blogroll, it's a difficult task to try and skim through
these -- this long blogroll and try to get a gist of what they're talking about in ten
minutes. But at least you've got these topics there.
If you now go from the Smarter Blogroll to the classic blogroll, you don't have that
assistance, and all you can think about is that you want those topics back. Now,
if you the change that order and the people start with the classic blogroll, it's a
difficult task, but they're thinking through that whole ten minutes, okay, I just have
to get through this, and then I'll have the smarter version there and it will tell me
the topics and it will be easier. And they get there, and the topics don't quite help
them that much. And so there's a disappointment factor going the other
direction, too.
And this sort of leads into the interesting result that there was actually no
difference in task performance between whether people had the Smarter Blogroll
or the classic blogroll. They had the same number of correct hits and the same
number of false positives.
And there are sort of a number of important take-aways from that. One of them
is that people were generally pretty excited about the possibility of tools to help
them read blogs. But one of difficult things here was that we sort of tried to
parameterize this browse task, trying to create a situation where people were
getting the gist of a list of blogs. When during the study what they ended up
doing was looking at the list of topics that we gave them and doing a search task.
So they would go to the first topic and say, okay, bicycles, let me find a post
about bicycles. And they sort of changed the task and didn't do it the way we
had envisioned.
But another interesting point was as people were doing this, there was this sort of
constant stream of talking that they would say, oh, well, this doesn't really match
how I would read blogs and I read my blogs this way, and I've sort of got it split
into these lists and all these various things. And this is actually a really difficult
problem because when we were in the process of designing this tool, we went
back to the literature on blogging and said, okay, what has been done about
people's reading practices because that's what we want to support was people's
blog reading practices.
What we found out, much to our surprise, is that very little research had been
done focusing specifically on blog readers. There was some work that
mentioned blog readers and that mentioned that blog readers were an important
part of blogging but nothing specifically focusing on the readers. So the following
summer I did a study, an exploratory qualitative study of blog reading practices.
Excuse me for a second. And what was really interesting was there's a quote
from Nardia et al's paper on blogging is a social activity where they say that
blogging is as much about reading as about writing and future research is sure to
pay attention to blog readers. And so that's what we went and did, we tried to
pay attention to the blog readers.
As I mentioned, this work was presented earlier this work in a paper at Kie
(phonetic). But what we were doing was sort of an exploratory study, a
qualitative study trying to understand the role of the reader and how readers
perceive bloggers' online presentation of self. And for this study we were trying
to find a theoretical framework that would help us understand reading.
And one of the thing that we came across that was actually really useful was this
idea from literary criticism of reader response theory. And reader response
theory argues that meaning is neither inherently in the text itself, nor solely in the
reader, but rather in the interactions between the two. And specifically we were
drawing on an essay by C.S. Lewis called an experiment in criticism where he
says let us sort of rather than trying to judge good literature by the qualities or
characteristics of the literature itself, let's see to what extent we can determine
literature by the type of reading that people do. And he argues that good
literature permits, invites or even compels good reading.
Now, what we were doing wasn't trying to sort good blogs from bad blogs but
rather we were trying to look at blogs in terms of this sort of interactionist
perspective. We wanted to ask to what extent could you look at different types of
blogs by the different types of interaction they invite, permit, or compel. And
another interesting point here is that reader response theory is all about
interactions with the text.
Well, blogging and other similar social media actually makes such interactions
explicit or they enable and allow explicit interaction with the text, so it seemed
like a really apt theory for or theoretical framework for what we wanted to do.
So as I mentioned before, this was a qualitative study, informed very much by
epigraphic methods. Most of the methods, methodology was semi-structured,
open-ended interviews.
We also did a quick demographic survey about various blog-reading practices
and that sort of thing. Those interview transcripts were then analyzed using an
iterative coding process where we started with open coding just kind of looking
for salient themes, and then once themes emerged going back and rereading
through the text and things like that.
So just a sort of quick profile of our participants for this study. We had 15
readers. 11 of them were female, four were male. They were all recruited from
the geographic area around UC Irvine, and so they were all either students,
undergrads or grad students or young professionals. The age ranged from 18 to
33 with an average of about 23.3.
But one of the really interesting things was that despite the relative heterogeneity
of this population in terms of demographics their reading practices were very
heterogenous; that is we had some people who only read two blogs regularly,
some people range all the way up into 20 or more blogs regularly. Some people
would read only two to three times per week, some people would read several
times a day.
So just to sort of outline of the findings that I want to talk about here. I'll go over
sort of some of the common practices. What actually were common traits across
most of our participants? And I'll talk about the different ways that people define
and constitute the word blog that it actually ended up being an incredibly
multifarious term.
And then I'll talk by sort of alluded to this earlier, this idea of identity presentation
and identity perception in online environments. And then the notion of being a
part of the blogs that one reads.
So in terms of common practices, one of the things that ran across all the
participants to whom we spoke was that blog reading is incredibly habitual, it's
routine, and one reader sort of compared it to email that sometimes when you
check your email you're not necessarily expecting to actually have email, you just
check it because that's what you do.
Similarly, these people would go to their -- go to blogs to read blogs not because
they expected there to be new posts but because it was part of their habit and
part of their routine.
Another interesting finding, there's a lot of rhetoric in information retrieval and
social media about this notion of information overload that there's simply too
much information out there that we can't really wrap all our heads around it or all
of it as once.
Well, what was interesting was of our 15 participants only two really felt that in
terms of blog reading there was too much out there. Most participants didn't
particularly feel overwhelmed or that there was too much information out there. If
they missed a couple posts, no big deal. They'd go back and read it if they had
time, if they didn't have time, it wasn't the end of the world. People didn't feel like
they were really particularly overwhelmed.
And that's sort of if you miss a couple posts leads into this notion that we called
(inaudible). So a lot of times computer media communication is distinguished
between being synchronous communication or asynchronous communication.
And blogs are usually seen as closer to asynchronous. But it's not, that didn't
really capture what we saw.
So for example let's say that one of our blog readers went out of town for two
weeks and they came back and there were a dozen new posts on their blog, on
one of the blogs that they read. Rather than going back and reading the posts
over say the last day or the last week, they would read the top three posts.
Whether or not those posts happened that same day, within the past week or
within the past month. It was that the order in which events happened and how
many posts were made mattered a lot more than specifically when those posts
were made.
So it sort of challenges this notion, it's not that time date stamps aren't important,
but it's not the first thing that people look at when they're determining how far
back to read in their blogs.
And then the last thing that was common amongst a lot of participants was a lot
of overloaded terminology, where the same word would mean lots and lots and
lots of different things. So for example, the -- people would use the term blog to
refer to an entire blog hosting site like LiveJournal or Xanga or My Space. They
would sometimes use the term blog to refer to an individual blog as in a series of
posts written by a single person.
They would sometimes use the word blog to refer to an individual post,
something like oh, I read a blog that he wrote yesterday. And this sort of brings
up the question of what is a blog? Usually the definitions that are given in the
literature are things in terms of structural or technical characteristics. So one of
the canonical definitions is given in a paper by Susan Herring (phonetic) and a
few other folks that a blog is a series of posts listed in reverse chronological
order given in frequent updates, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But when we asked our participants the sort of deceptively simple question, what
is a blog, they would say things like, well, there's the technical term and my own
definition. And then so we'd say, okay, well, when do you use which definition?
And invariably it was it depends.
Another participant when we asked what a blog is, she responded the following
way: A blog is something that's still going on, that has a conversation going on
that has people commenting. It has this dialogue between the person who is
posting and the people who are reading.
And this is really reminiscent of this notion of an interactional definition that
blogging really is about an interaction between the reader and the text or perhaps
between the reader and the author. And we see this as sort of indicating that our
choice of reader response theory in this context is particularly apt.
A lot of other previous research and online social interaction has looked at the
notion of presentation of self or presentation of online identified. And so what we
wanted to do was ask the other side of the question, how do people perceive
this, this online present itself? Well, one of the important aspects of this was the
notion of authenticity that a lot of readers looked at bloggers as being something
authentic or personal, whether or not they knew the person offline or not. And
that sort of brings up this question of online identity versus offline identity, and it's
something that a lot of our readers really tackled with. There was one participant
in particular who always used a pseudonym, and there are lots of research
papers describing similar things.
Another aspect that a lot of previous researchers talked about is that bloggers
feel an obligation or that they feel that there's a certain sort of expectations that
readers have them. Things like bloggers think that readers expect them to post
regularly and have good content in their posts and regular updates and sort of
aesthetic, a pleasing visual style for their blog.
And so what we want to say was, well, do people actually have those
expectations? And what we found is that readers' expectations actually vary a
lot, largely along the lines of whether the blog they're reading is a large high
traffic blog or whether it's the blog of a close personal friend. If it's a large high
traffic blog they tend to have much higher expectations of the blogger than if it's a
close personal friend.
What was also interesting here is that readers also felt obligations to bloggers
and that's something that hasn't really been talked about in the previous
research.
One reader said that a good post deserves a good reply from the audience, that
if the blogger takes the time to put something out there that's well thought out
and well constructed, them the reader is obligated to comment back and not just
to leave a comment but the comment need to be well thought out and well
constructed as well.
And then the last thing that I want to talk about here is this notion of being a part.
And this was something that all our participants talked about in one way or
another, that -- and it's not quite the idea of being a member of a community, it's
more along the lines of belonging or this sense of participation. But what actually
constitutes participation also varies widely, so one participant said that just by
reading I feel like I'm participating.
She didn't have to comment or email the blogger to feel like she was really being
a part of the blog. But that's not always the case. That there were other ways
where one of our participants said that because he doesn't comment he doesn't
feel like he's a part of the blog, that commenting was essential for being a part of
the blog.
And again, this tended to vary along the lines of the readers' relationship with the
blogger. If it was someone that the reader knew personally, then just reading
constituted participation in the blog.
If it was a large high traffic blog then reading alone wasn't quite in you have to
create that sort of connection to the blogger. But another interesting aspect
about that is that connection changes over time. So for example one of our
participants read a blog that was largely commentary on pop culture and
occasional sort of witty humorous excerpts from the news.
But occasionally the blogger would also post pictures of his cats and the reader
said what's up with the cat posts, I mean this isn't something that I really care
about, I'm coming here for the humor and the entertainment value, I don't want to
see your cats.
But what happened over time is that as she read the blog progressively more and
more, she sort of developed this closer sense of connection with the blogger, so
much so that the cat post stopped being annoying and actually became
endearing and they created this sort of close personal connection or feeling of a
personal connection between the reader and the blogger without any sort of
explicit interaction between the two.
And the general point there is that a lot of this depends on the relationship
between the blogger and the reader, and that relationship evolves and changes
over time.
So the last segment that I want to talk about today is a study that we actually just
concluded and submitted a paper about. Focusing on people who read political
blogs. So there were a couple reasons that we chose to follow up and look at
specifically political blogs.
One of them is that we wanted to understand more closely this relationship and
interaction between the blogger and the readers. We also wanted to look at the
impact of reading beyond blogs, what happens when people are reading blogs
and how does that translate into other spheres of interaction?
And it seemed like political blogs, I mean you could choose sort of any
specifically grounded but political blogs seemed particularly apt given the current
political climate in the U.S. to look at ways that interaction on blogs affects
interaction in other places and vice versa. And so what we did is we selected
one liberal blog and one conservative blog, we recruited a number of readers
from each blog. And we ended up with five readers from each blog.
And then we also did interviews with the bloggers from those blogs to understand
the interaction from both sides. And as I said, this was just recently submitted,
so I'll sort of give an overview of some of the salient findings.
One of the -- so what we found one of the primary motivators for people was in
reading political blogs was some form of interaction. A lot of people read partially
to stay informed and partially to engage in political debate and partially for
entertainment value a lot of times.
But really it came down to interaction, either with the blogger or with the other
readers through comments sections. And similar to our previous study, most
people felt the sense of being a part of the blogs that they read but in this context
a lot of people talked about that they felt that they as the individual were not a
significant part of the blog. And this is particularly interesting because a number
of our participants recounted specific episodes where they would email a blogger
or make a comment on the blog and the blogger would then take the content
from that email or blog and repost it as an update to their post and say, hey, this
person wrote me with this great idea and I had to share it and so readers really
are having a significant impact but yet they don't feel like they are.
And there's this sort of tension there. Another interesting aspect was that blog
reading actually became sort of a form of political participation or for some
people almost a form of political activism that we also asked participants about
their general political involvement and we had one person who worked as a poll
worker and another person who was very dedicated and drove around her
precinct putting information on people's doors about here's your caucusing
location, here's how the process works, et cetera, et cetera, trying to get people
involved.
But for the most part our participants were not incredibly politically active. Some
of them would donate or make campaign contributions, some have them might
write their representatives, but it wasn't incredibly politically active group.
But what we found is that the -- that active reading political blogs almost served
as a surrogate for some other form of political participation. And one of our
participants talked about this and he said that you know, I'm not really the type of
person who's going to go out to a rally or protest or picket somewhere but I will
read blogs and I will engage in political debate that way.
And so this online interaction sort of becomes a new form of political
participation. And the other thing is that I want to use this as sort of an
opportunity to question some of the analytic distinctions that we make when we
are analyzing social interactions online. One of them is sort of the very question
of bloggers versus readers. In trying to put people into these different pots.
So in the first study that I talked about, I guess -- no, in the second study I talked
about, the exploratory qualitative study with 15 participates from around UC
Irvine, of those 15, 12 of them were also bloggers themselves.
And then in our -- in the study that we did of political blog readers, we had what
was it, one of them was an active blogger, one of them has a blog but doesn't
post frequently, one of them used to blog but doesn't really anymore and one of
them actually started blogging as a result of participating in our study, he said.
And what I want to question is this notion of trying to draw a clear distinction
between bloggers and readers. And I think it might be more beneficial to look at
it in terms of the types of activities that people are doing that certain activities are
writing oriented or reading oriented.
So the person who is writing the post, it's obviously a writing oriented activity.
But if that person is commenting on on another blog post somewhere there may
be a reading aspect to it as well.
Similarly, if someone is commenting on a blog, that's certainly a reader oriented
activity or a reading oriented activity. They're doing it because they read the blog
post and they're responding to it. But it's also a writing oriented activity. Not only
in the fact that they actually have to compose a comment and actually write it, but
that comment then goes and affects the tone and actually ends up shaping the
blog.
And so trying to make a clear distinction between what's writing and what's
reading, I'm not saying that you can't make that distinction, but it might not be as
informative as looking at the various ways that all of these different activities sort
of contribute to the collaborative co-construction of the blog by bloggers and
readers together.
And the other distinction that I kind of want to call into question is this notion of
online versus offline. Some of the -- some of the early work on online social
interaction said that well, people go online to be somebody else completely. I'm
thinking here partially of Shari Turkell's (phonetic) work looking at multi-user
dungeons, that people would go online and assume another persona or explore
different aspects of their own personality.
And later there was other work that said that, well, there's sometimes that that's
not the case, that people go online not to be somebody else but to be
themselves. And there's a study of the usage of the Internet in Trinidad and
Togabo by Miller and Slater where they say that these people don't go online to
be somebody else, they go online to be Trini. An important part of being Trini is
this family connection, and so one of the things that they describe is that a
mother who has a daughter that lives in London will go online in Trinidad, check
the weather in London and say if it's going to rain, make sure you bring your
umbrella, because that's part of what being Trini is, it's connecting to your family.
And so there really online is almost identical with who they are offline. But what
we see here is online and offline in the studies that we have done around blog
reading, they're not mutually exclusive, but they're not completely coincident,
either.
A lot of our blog readers would go through great lengths to obfuscate their
identity, that they would comment with the same handle and the same made up
email address every time so that the blogger would know who they were, but
there was really no connection to who they were offline.
And others it was a much subtler negotiation. And the point that I want to get at
with all this isn't that the distinction between online and offline is necessarily a
bad distinction to make but that making that distinction might actually be
misleading and cause us to in our analysis miss important aspects of these
interactions that are actually occurring.
And I want to suggest that we might think about developing different terminology
or different conceptualizations or ways of thinking about it that go beyond simply
online versus offline.
So to wrap up, I really hope that this study and studies like this are really the
beginning of an exploration of notions of readers and readership in lots of other
social media. So the studies that I've talked about have been specifically
focusing on blog readers and readership and blogging but you could look at
readers of Flickr, the notion of readership on YouTube or people who read
Wikipedia.
The people who read Wikipedia or use it as a reference, I'm not talking about the
people who contribute, the authors, the people who just go and read articles, do
they necessarily know about the editing process behind this? Do they know what
the administrative and governance procedures of Wikipedia are?
There's been some research by Ed Chi from Park with a Wiki dashboard trying to
expose some of this. But I think it would be really interesting to do studies of
people who read Wikipedia regularly.
Another sort of important area or design area for tools that I think this opens up is
tools aimed specifically at blog readers. Partially to sort of facilitate richer social
interactions between bloggers and readers or richer interactions around blogging
that the tools they have right now are sort of impoverished and people do have
rich interactions with the tools that are there, but I think there's sort of a space to
open that up and explore what other types of interactions can you have there?
And then the other space that I think is really open there is I talked a little bit
about how blog reading in our first study was very much habitual or routinized.
What was interesting is that a lot of participants were very reflective about why
they read blogs, about their motivation, but they weren't as reflective about how
they read or what they read.
And I think there's a really neat space there for tools to sort of encourage
reflection of blog readers, partially on their own practices and habits of blog
reading but partially to get them to read between the words and behind the words
and sort of encourage them to go out of this habitual routine process and make it
more of an engaging read.
One of the -- and so one of the tools that I'm working on along the lines of this,
and this sort of goes back to the line of research that Danyel had mentioned at
the beginning is in the area of trying to computationally identify conceptual
metaphors that are in a written text.
So if you think about the way that we talk about having an argument that you
attack someone's position or you defend your point or she obliterated her
opponent the words and the language that we use evince these images of
combat and war.
And there's work by Lakeoff (phonetic) and Johnson and lots of other folks saying
that this is actually evidence of a conceptional metaphor that we frame our
experience of being in an argument in terms of being at war with someone.
And so a large portion of the dissertation research that I'm actually doing is
working on computational methods of taking large bodies of text and identifying
what conceptual metaphors are being used here.
And what I want to do is take that and apply it in the context of political blogs to
sort of encourage this critical reflection and critical engagements with the text to
draw people out, to encourage discussions about what conceptual metaphors are
being used here. What does this metaphor highlight or draw out, what aspects of
the same situation does that metaphor hide or downplay, and what's a different
metaphor you might use to conceptualize the same situation?
Also, just a really quick plug. I'm going to be around for today and part of
tomorrow. I know I'm meeting with some folks, but if anyone else is interested in
chatting, I've got a little time tomorrow afternoon, just come up after the talk and
let me know.
Just some quick acknowledgements. The one that I want to coll out of this is the
California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and their
summer undergraduate funding program and information technologies. They
funded Mark Suyoshi (phonetic) during last summer and really without their
support, none of this research would have been possible, so I really want to
thank them.
I'll go ahead and open it up for questions now. And those of you watching via the
webcast in your offices, you can email Danyel questions, Danyel F, and he will
relay them to me. So think you again, and I'll take questions now.
>>: Do you have (inaudible) how many people participate or successfully
(inaudible)?
>> Eric Baumer: So that I think is actually a really important area for work. All
the studies that we've done so far have been small qualitative studies. They're
not statistical, they're not quantitative. I think it's really important and it's an open
area for research if anybody's looking for a project I might suggest doing that.
But I unfortunately don't have statistics. I know that there's -- I know that there is
something called the blog readers project, which allows bloggers to post surveys
on their site and get demographic information about their blog, about their
readers, but I don't believe that that's actually focused on interaction or trying to
explore how many of these themes generalize to very broad ranging blog reading
audience.
>>: Just actually to contribute to that question, (inaudible) work from 10 or so
years ago looked at workers on use groups and sort of found what he estimated
was an 80-20 percentages. What I actually wanted to ask you was a follow-up
question, which is when (inaudible) was doing that work, he found that people
who are lurking in one space were almost always active in another, that is I'm not
a blogger but I'm Wikipedia editor, I'm not a Wikipedia editor or blogger, but
(inaudible) on Flickr. Did you find the same sort of thing, are we turning into a,
you know, are 90 percent of us sitting there staring at the wall?
>> Eric Baumer: We actually found something very similar and it's something I
didn't get a chance to talk about too much, but the sort of variance between
whether people interact or whether they don't. Like I mentioned, it has to do with
the relationship between the reader and the blogger, and it does highly vary.
There was an example where one of our participants in the exploratory
qualitative study was a chemistry grad student, and she read several blogs by
chemistry professors but never really commented or interacted there, because,
because she was also a very active knit blogger. She maintained her own
knitting blog and had a huge social network of other knit blogs that she read.
And so her online blog reading was basically strictly about this recreational
knitting activity, and she didn't want to link that to her personal life.
So I think that to some extent we see the same thing here, that people who are
lurking or not commenting in one area, may be very active participants of another
community and actively commenting in other places. Other questions?
>>: For the sake of simplicity, I'll just use readers and bloggers. But as a great
distinction to coll out. In your research did you notice if readers are connecting
with other readers and to what extent?
>> Eric Baumer: So that was something that actually varied a lot between the
two studies that we did. In the first study, though, the largely exploratory one,
very few people actually talked about interacting with the other readers. They
talked a lot about interacting with the blogger, the blogger commenting but not so
much with the other readers.
In our study of people reading political blogs, there was a lot more discussion
about interaction with other readers. Excuse me. So much so that some people
actually said they would go to a blog and they would only read the posts that they
thought would encourage interesting discussion with other readers. They would
just skim the post quickly and then go right to the comment section.
And so I sort of hesitate to draw any sort of broader conclusion from that, but I
think it's because that particular community is invested and interested and
engaged in having a debate. What they're there to do is interact with other
people whereas in the first study there wasn't really this idea of interacting
around a common interest or a common topic.
So again, it varies. But I would hazard a guess that it varies largely along the
lines of the reader's motivation, whether or not they're there to interact with other
readers.
In the back.
>>: Have you looked at patterns and content that cause more reader
participation? So, for example what I noticed is if postings have questions on
them like what you think or what is your take, I will get more people participating
with comments than when I don't, and then if I make a stupid mistake on my
posting or I suspect some people do purposely, like (inaudible) you get tons of
comment. Have you looked at that at all?
>> Eric Baumer: So we didn't actually look at that focusing on that, the different
factors that lead to participation or more comments or whatever.
From a sort of anecdotal perspective in the political blog reader study, while we
were interviewing the readers of these blogs, we ourselves, the researchers were
also reading the blogs. And one thing that we noticed that our participants
noticed as well is that humor actually had a large bearing on whether or not
people would comment.
Posts where someone could comment by making a joke or make some kind of
snarky remark, they were much more likely to have high comment counts than
posts that were strictly about information or analysis or discussion.
That is most likely due largely to the nature of the blog that we were looking at,
the particular blog that I'm thinking is very geared at this sort of sarcastic, witty
commentary on politics. And so I don't know if we can -- if I would go so far as to
make any sort of generalization about what leads people to comment or what
doesn't, but I would guess that it's not entirely in the content of the post, that
whether or not people comment or interact again goes back to their motivations
for reading. And I think that would be the key. You might be able to find some
kind of trends if you did large-scale quantitative analysis of these different blog
corpora and which ones cause more comments or this sort of thing, but I suspect
that a lot of it also has to do with readers' motivations. Yes?
>>: So regarding kind of the motivations, do you have any data on readers that
also get sort of become guest bloggers? Because I know there's some cases,
like my friend has a political blog and he had a lot of readers (inaudible) guest
bloggers, and I also know on net blogs, for example, they choose certain people
to be bloggers for those different cities based on their activity or (inaudible)
interesting and how many comments they get against it.
>> Eric Baumer: So of our participants that were readers, none of them
mentioned ever being asked to be a guest blogger or submit a guest blog entry.
One of the bloggers to whom we spoke actually talked about a desire to try and
find guest bloggers. But the people that he was talking about recruiting weren't
his readers, they were things like his uncle who he thought was incredibly funny
or someone with whom he worked. And so I mean it might be the case that lots
of guest bloggers are recruited from the readership, but we didn't see a lot of
that. I'd be hard pressed to make a generalization. I mean that's another great
thing that it would be good to do a large scale survey about, who are the guest
bloggers, are they readers, are they bloggers from other blogs, are they just
random writers who say, hey, write me a blog post. But we didn't see a lot of
readers being asked to be guest bloggers.
Other questions or comments? All right.
>> Danyel Fisher: Let's go ahead and thank the speaker.
(Applause)
>> Eric Baumer: Thank you, all.