Three papers were submitted for Sunbelt from BROG and our memebers, all three were accepted. CA in February, now there is rough duty. LOL Paper title, authors, and abstracts follow.

Social Network Dynamics in the Blogosphere

Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, Sarah Mercure, John Paolillo, Lois Ann Scheidt, Peter Welsch, and Elijah Wright

Interest in the dynamic nature of hyperlinked corpora has recently been extended to the blogosphere, or universe of weblogs (Kumar et al., 2003). At the same time, the blogosphere is attracting the interest of social network researchers as patterns of interlinking among weblogs are found to exhibit properties of clustering, centrality, and reciprocity (Herring, et al., 2005). As yet, however, little if any research has investigated the evolution over time of social networks in the blogosphere. In this paper, we present the results of a longitudinal study of the link networks of four random blogs collected at three intervals between April and November 2004. An algorithm was created to collect a snowball sample of all blogs at one, two, and three links away from each source blog, gathering approximately 6,000 unique URLs at each time interval. The patterns of linking among the blogs in the three samples were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative methods, and the networks characterized through visualization. The results reveal changes in patterns of linking related to identifiable external events, including the United States presidential election campaign in fall of 2004. These and other observed dynamics are interpreted in terms of who and what is socially valued within the blogosphere at a given point in time.

Herring, S. C., Kouper, I., Paolillo, J. C., Scheidt, L. A., Tyworth, M., Welsch, P., Wright, E., & Yu, N. (2005, January). Conversation in the blogosphere: An analysis "from the bottom up." Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-38). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press. Available from http://www.blogninja.com/hicss05.blogconv.pdf.

Kumar, R., Novak, P., Raghavan, S., & Tomkins, A. (2003). On the bursty evolution of Blogspace. Proceedings of the Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference, Budapest, Hungary. Availabe from http://www2003.org/cdrom/papers/refereed/p477/p477-kumar/p477-kumar.htm.

Mood, Music and Friends: Mapping the Culture of LiveJournal

John Paolillo, Elijah Wright, and Sarah Mercure

LiveJournal is a popular weblog/community hosting service with over five million predominantly young, female users from the US. Although reported ages range from 13 to 55, and users hail from 240 different counties, users nonetheless experience LiveJournal as having its own distinct culture. How is this culture created, and is it observable in the posts and profiles of LiveJournal's users?

To address these questions, we collected a snowball sample of LiveJournal user profiles, containing information about users' interests and friends, as self-reported and regularly maintained through a web form-based interface. Principal components analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis were used to analyze the interests and social positions of a subset of users (approximately 10,000) for whom complete information was available. The results were visualized in a series of reduced sociograms, which were used as a guide to select representative blogs for qualitative content analysis.

The results reveal that there is a highly-structured core of LiveJournal users with well-defined and contrasting sets of interests as well as a large periphery defined by sets of contrasting, but less coherent interests. Qualitative analysis confirms the existence of these groups, and shows them to be correlated with off-line subcultural styling (e.g. goth, punk, etc.). Musical taste is the clearest correlate of group membership, while weak-tie channels of interaction relate the groups to one another.

LiveJournal is thus a dynamic social market where youthful users craft and explore their public identities in ways that conform to off-line social categories, often through the commoditized world of popular music. The mechanisms of this process are exposed through the publicly-available profiles and posts of millions of users of LiveJournal and other weblog sites.

Revolutionary Vanguard or Echo Chamber? Political Blogs and the Mainstream Media

Peter Welsch

Weblogs have been hailed as a technological innovation that will revolutionize social and cultural institutions, particularly journalism and, by extension, electoral politics. However, the degree to which blogs rely on resources within the mainstream media or supplement and replace them with other sources, and the degree to which ideology or political orientation relate to such action, remain largely unexamined.

This paper presents the initial results of a longitudinal study tracking four political weblogs: two from the top of the popular "A-List" and two selected at random from the wider blogosphere, both pairs contrasting along partisan lines. All four were tracked for one day, with individual posts being used to seed a snowball sample of websites linked to out to three tiers of iteration. The resulting collection of URLs was subjected to social network and qualitative analysis.

Initial findings point to different patterns of linking according to the authors' degree of connectedness and their political orientation, particularly in terms of A-List bloggers' tendencies to link to blogs as opposed to mainstream media sources in their posts. These tendencies are expressed by marked differences in the shape and apparent function of the blogs' social networks, with the differences between right and left wing blogs becoming more pronounced at higher levels of iteration. Overlap between the right and left wing networks is virtually non-existent at all levels, suggesting that competing narratives are being propagated not only by individual political blog authors but through their social networks.

Posted by prolurkr at December 15, 2004 09:09 AM

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