Having finished and submitted a paper on understanding weblog communities with Lilia I have to be quick to ensure all issues addressed in the paper are on my blog before it gets accepted or rejected (after which I'll post the link to the paper).
It is challenging to think about weblog communities in the first place. Jack Vinson has a thoughtful post on the matter in general. Previously, I have argued that when one wants to study weblog communities one has to look at multiple dimensions (documents, terms, persons, links, time). Consider the following relatively simple question one might ask about a weblog community: What is the trend of usage for term X? A researcher asking such a question might be interested in the stickiness of the term, whether it is a chatter term used all the time or a spiky term that just pops up once or every so often. Two graphs:
The top graph trends the term "knowledge management" and the bottom one "Skype" for a year (365 days) in a weblog community. The blue lines trend the term for the entire community and it is resonable to conclude that both terms are chatter given that they are more less continously used. The green lines paint an entirely different picture however. The green line trends term usage by only looking at linked posts in the community. KM is still a chatter term, but Skype is no longer. Skype is spiky, this can be explained by community members linking to Skype related posts on new features or versions, and using Skype as a casual term when blogging on topics that don't interest the community members. The red lines plot the trend in unlinked posts.
There seems to be significant difference between the two terms that is not revealed when one just plots term usage in a community based on all posts. Only when one makes a distinction between linked posts and unlinked posts the difference becomes apparent. What does this mean? One conclusion might be that to equate a community with it all it produces (weblog posts in this case) is perhaps not the right thing to do. Given that weblog communities are virtual, the link is the primary device to acknowledge membership and alignment, and linked posts (and the terms they contain) are therefore more likely to be of interest to the community compared to unlinked posts.
Which makes me thinking that in case of defining unique contribution of a community member it could make sense to compare community-linked-posts to person-linked-posts (alternative is person-all-posts would show specific member expertise that is there, but not necessarily "used" by others in conversations)...
Posted by: Lilia | July 12, 2006 at 02:10 PM
One more idea - can we have a measure (without making a visualisation) for conversation+chatter terms and then select those that fit as a "community chatter cloud"?
Posted by: Lilia | July 12, 2006 at 02:16 PM
This makes me think of Jyri Engestroms objects of sociality (again). An object of sociality is seen as a piece of information that is used to create/reconfirm a human relationship.
So maybe the linked to terms such as Skype are the ones that serve as the 'social glue' in the community at hand, while other things might no longer serve that role (KM e.g. in my eyes seems to have lost its meaningful role as a term in our discussions: too little difference between our views to be able to use the term as a distinctive label.), or never have served that role.
But you always put out more stuff than is being used in the actual interaction with a community, because you don't know beforehand what will start serving in this role as object of sociality.
I put up all my pictures in Flickr, although only a hand full are the ones that play a rol in the interaction with my peers. I just don't know which pictures of the ones I take will trigger that interaction, and which won't.
Just a couple of of the cuff thoughts
Posted by: Ton Zijlstra | July 13, 2006 at 10:07 AM
Just curious why you want to address all the issues here before the paper is accepted or rejected?
Posted by: Ericka | July 13, 2006 at 04:19 PM
Hi Ericka,
Basically it is easier for most people to read a blog than to read a paper. Writing the paper was a little defragmentation and clean up exercise.
There is also a more "practical" reason I cannot reveal at this moment :-).
Posted by: Anjo | July 14, 2006 at 09:26 PM