Blogging Around the Globe: Motivations, Privacy Concerns and Social Networking

2 Blogging Around the Globe: motivations, privacy concerns and social networking Mei Kobayashi IBM Research-Tokyo, 1623-14 Shimotsuruma, Yamato-shi, Kanagawa-ken 242-8502 Japan [email protected] Blogging has become popular since its introduction the late 1990s, and the practice continues to grow. Blogs exemplify internet-age, user-generated content that is changing the way people access information, form social networks, and interact with acquaintances. Moreover, blogs are associated with extensive social communities defined by interconnecting references, and are considered to be one of the early catalysts for propelling the popularity of on-line social networking. This paper traces the de- velopment of blogs and the blogosphere around the globe. National surveys conducted by numerous international teams of researchers indicate motivations for blogging and attitudes regarding privacy are strikingly different in countries with large blogging communities. These differences are reflected in the content of blogs and profoundly influence blog-based social networks, which tend to be region-centric. Keywords: blog, blogosphere, social networks, social network analysis (SNA) 1. Introduction A weblog, or blog is a website that contains periodic, reverse chronologically or- dered entries on a common webpage. Each entry or blog post, at a blogsite is writ- ten and published by a blogger (or group of bloggers) who maintain the site. The collection of all blogs is known as the blogosphere. Blogs often serve as on-line diaries, evangelical platforms, or as an informal medium for reporting on events. Most are maintained by an individual (individual blogs or single-author blogs). However, blogging by groups of individuals (community blogs or multi-authored blogs) with similar viewpoints or common purpose is increasing (Agarwal and Liu 2008, 2009). When blogging started in the US in the late 1990’s, participants needed suffi- ciently strong programming skills to build and maintain their own sites. As inex- pensive and free software to support the practice became widely available, blogging spread rapidly. The blogosphere has grown and diversified from a white, well-educated, US male-dominated community to ordinary people of both sexes from a wide range of age groups, countries and socio-economic backgrounds. In March of 2005 Technorati1 reported the doubling of blogs every five months, and approximately 7.8 million blogs and 937 million links in the blogosphere (Sifry 2005). For example, data from March 2005 is roughly double that from October 1 TechnoratiTM, Inc.: http://technorati.com/ 3 2004. By December 2007, Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs. We tried blogpulse2, another popular blog analysis and search engine on July 13, 2009 and found 112,326,499 blogs in the world. About a year later, on Aug. 3, 2010, blogpulse identified 144,217,571 total blogs. The top five featured people were: Lady Gaga (215732 messages), Lindsay Lohan Lohan (62079), Kim Kar- dashian (31572), Angelina Jolie (53335) and Jessica Simpson (22267), confirming that blogging is now practiced by the masses, not just computer scientists. The rise in blogging has been accompanied by a sharp increase in spam-like blogs or splogs (Kesmodel 2005; Kolari 2005, 2007). A splog is “a fake blog created solely to promote affiliated Web sites, with the intent of skewing search re- sults and artificially boosting traffic”3. This situation has created new challenges as well as new opportunities for business and internet analysts. In March 2005, Technorati estimated that 40,000 new blogs were being created every day (i.e., new blog sites, not to be confused with new postings on existing sites). By the fall of 2005, Technorati’s estimates grew to 70,000 new blogs per day, of which 2% to 8% were splogs. In July 2007, Technorati’s estimates grew to 120,000 new blogs per day (i.e., 1.4 new blogs per second), of which 3,000 to 7,000 were splogs (Si- fry 2007). Splog creation reached a monthly peak in December 2006 when 11,000 new splogs were created every day. Recent actions by some blog hosting services are having a noticeable effect on reducing the overall proportion of splogs. “Will the negative publicity (from splogs) give blogging a bad name? No more than spam gives e-mail a bad name. … splogging will rather give sploggers a bad name – meanwhile blogging is here to stay.” – B.L.Ochman, President of WhatsNextOnline.com (2005) Despite the problem posed by splogs, the popularity of blogs and blogging remains strong. A spring 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center4 found that blog readers outnumber writers. 12% of US internet users (9% of adults) have their own blog, while 33% (24% of adults) read blogs. Furthermore, only 5% of bloggers write on a regular, daily basis, while 11% of the readership read blogs on a daily basis (Smith 2008). Blogs epitomize the growing mass of user-generated content that is changing the way people access information, make and interact with friends, and form pro- fessional communities. Other examples of internet sites that are actively promote or are conducive to social networking include: friendship sites (e.g., Facebook5, hi5 6, MySpace7, tagged8); collaborative tagging sites (e.g., Delicious9, Stumble- 2 blogpulseTM of Nielsen BuzzMetrics: http://www.blogpulse.com 3 Whatis.com, definition of splog: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci1137059,00.html 4 Pew Research Center: http://pewresearch.org/ 5 FacebookTM: http://www.facebook.om 6 hi5 NetworksTM, Inc.: http://www.hi5.com 7 MySpace.comTM: http://www.myspace.com 8 TaggedTM, Inc.: http://www.tagged.com 9 DeliciousTM: http://delicious.com 4 Upon10); audio, image and video sharing sites (flickr11, photobucket12, playlist13, YouTube14), and wikis15. In 2006, Time magazine named, “You” as “Person of the Year” for their participation in “a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before” (Grossman 2006). Given the sudden and powerful emergence of blogs as a forum for self- expression, social networking, and dissemination of information, we felt that a survey of this topic would be of interest to a wide audience. At the same time, we realize that a comprehensive review would be impossible due to the widespread influence of blogs and the ever-changing landscape of the blogosphere. Although we whittled the broader topic of blog mining to motivations, privacy concerns and social networking, it is still too large for comprehensive coverage. We hope that this review will serve as a useful introduction to readers with limited background on blogs, while illustrating the diversity of the international blogging community. We also hope that it will point to some interesting new avenues for research. This chapter is organized as follows. The remainder of this section summa- rizes the history of blogs and differences between blogs and general Web pages. The second section examines blogging around the globe, with emphasis on trends in Japan, which has the highest readership and bloggers per capita. It concludes with a summary of statistics and trends about Twitter16, a microblogging service. The third section reviews some basic in tools social network analysis (SNA) and recent work on SNA of blogs and analysis of comments on postings. For the most part, these works examine English-based blog sites in the United States. Given wide disparities in motivations and attitudes regarding privacy in different global regions, we speculate on possible extensions and limitations of the methods and their applicability to blogs outside of the United States. We conclude with a discussion on some possible directions for research. 1.1 Blogging: Motivations and Privacy Concerns In 1999, Merriam-Webster On-Line17 recognized the neologism: blog (ˈblȯg, ˈbläg) noun, short for Weblog: a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer; also: the contents of such a site; blog·ger noun; blog·ging noun (entered in 1999) 10 StumbleUponTM : http://www.stumbleupon.com 11 flickrTM: http://www.flickr.com 12 photobucketTM: http://photobucket.com 13 playlist.comTM: http:www.playlist.com 14 YouTubeTM: http:www.youtube.com 15 Wikipedia: http:www.wikipedia.org 16 TwitterTM, Inc.: http://twitter.com/ 17 Merriam-WebsterTM On-Line: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blog 5 Blogging as an activity existed in many forms prior to the evolution of the internet, for example, personal diaries and diaries based on themes (e.g., travel, cooking, gardening, personal vignettes) were published in book form. One of the milestones in the history of blogging was the birth of the World Wide Web in 1992, as it en- abled anyone with internet access to publish on-line notes, opinions and diaries for view by the general public. Anyone, in principle, could start and maintain a Web page to publish their unedited thoughts in near real-time. However, there are major differences between blogs and general Web pages. For example, blogging does not require programming knowledge since many types of Weblog software (software designed to simplify the creation and mainte- nance of blogs) are readily available. Some software tools are free, open source software (e.g., Apache Roller18, LiveJournal19, WordPress20). Others that are pro- prietary may require purchase of a user license, depending on the intended use (e.g., Telligent Community 21, Windows Live Writer and Windows Live Writer team blog22, Traction TreamPage23). Blog hosting services that are operated by the developer allow users to blog without having to install special software (e.g., Blogger, MySpace , Open Diary 24). Blogs serve as a friendly facilitator of discussion between the writer and readers since most blogging software provide simple means to post comments. And there appears to be a lower psychological barrier in the blogosphere to comment since there is an expectation of interactivity in the blogging community.

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