Access to weblogs, both through commercial services and in academic studies, is usually limited to the content of the weblog posts. This overlooks an important aspect distinguishing weblogs from other web pages: the ability of weblog readers to respond to posts directly, by posting comments. In this paper we present a large-scale study of weblog comments and their relation to the posts. Using a sizable corpus of comments, we estimate the overall volume of comments in the blogosphere; analyze the relation between the weblog popularity and commenting patterns in it; and measure the contribution of comment content to various aspects of weblog access.

Weblogs (or blogs) are frequently updated webpages with posts typically in reverse-chronological order. Blogging is the latest form of online communication to gain widespread popularity and it is rapidly becoming mainstream. Media attention tends to focus on "heavy-hitting " blogs devoted to politics, punditry and technology, but it has recently become apparent that vast majority of blogs are written by ordinary people for much smaller audiences, and on largely personal themes. Surprisingly little is known about this "blogging by the rest of us", especially from the blogger's point of view. This paper presents the preliminary results of an ethnographic study of blogging as a form of personal expression and communication. We characterize a number of blogging practices, and then consider blogging as personal journaling. We find blogging to be a surprisingly versatile medium, with uses similar to an online diary, personal chronicle or newsletter, and much more. The next few years should provide a fascinating opportunity for research and design as blogging tools improve and blog usage evolves and flourishes.

Abstract: To date, one of the main aims of the World Wide Web has been to provide users with information. In addition to private homepages, large professional information providers, including news services, companies, and other organisations have set up web-sites. With the development and advance of recent technologies such as wikis, blogs, podcasting and file sharing this model is challenged and community-driven services are gaining influence rapidly. These new paradigms obliterate the clear distinction between information providers and consumers. The lines between producers and consumers are blurred even more by services such as Wikipedia, where every reader can become an author, instantly. This paper presents an overview of a broad selection of current technologies and services: blogs, wikis including Wikipedia and Wikinews, social networks such as Friendster and Orkut as well as related social services like del.icio.us, file sharing tools such as Flickr, and podcasting. These services enable user participation on the Web and manage to recruit a large number of users as authors of new content. It is argued that the transformations the Web is subject to are not driven by new technologies but by a fundamental mind shift that encourages individuals to take part in developing new structures and content. The evolving services and technologies encourage ordinary users to make their knowledge explicit and help a collective intelligence to develop.

Blogging has grown exponentially on the Internet; however, the role of blogs within the enterprise remains ambiguous. Why and how do individuals use internal corporate blogs? What results do both individuals and the corporation realize from internal blogs? Our exploratory study of a large global IT corporation’s internal blogging system analyzed usage statistics, interviews, and the results of an anonymous, web-based survey. We found that benefits to users were social as well as informational, and that connecting with their community was an important value sought by all types of users. Heavy users of the system realized the greatest benefits, but they also constituted the core of an online community that provided important benefits to medium users as well. 1.

Editors, email, and instant messaging were first widely used by students who later brought knowledge of their uses and effective practices into workplaces. Weblogs may make such a transition more quickly. We present a study of emergent blogging practices in a corporate setting. We attended meetings, read email, documents, and weblogs, and interviewed 38 people— bloggers, infrastructure administrators, attorneys, public relations specialists, and executives. We found an experimental, rapidly-evolving terrain marked by growing sophistication about balancing personal, team, and corporate incentives and issues. widespread until a generation with keyboard skills arrived. In most organizations, email required significant new infrastructure—hardware, software, and administrative support. Today‘s emerging technologies will have an easier time. IM clients are easily downloaded. Free or inexpensive web-based weblog technology is available. Costs for organizational hosting remain, but are substantially lower than in the past. 1.

Improving management of information and knowledge in organizations has long been a major objective, but efforts to address it often foundered. Knowledge typically resides in structured documents, informal discussions that may or may not persist online, and in tacit form. Terminology differences and dispersed contextual information hinder efforts to use formal representations. Features of dynamic emerging technologies—unstructured tagging, weblogs, and search—show strong promise in overcoming past obstacles. They exploit digital representations of less formal language and could greatly increase the value of such representations. 1.

Abstract 1 Weblogs are important new components of the Internet. They provide individual users with an easy way to publish online and others to comment on these views. Furthermore, there is a suite of secondary applications that allow weblogs to be linked, searched, and navigated. Although originally intended for individual use, in practice weblogs increasingly appear to facilitate distributed conversations. This could have important implications for the use of this technology as a medium for collaboration. Given the special characteristics of weblogs and their supporting applications, they may be well suited for a range of conversational purposes that require different forms of argumentation. In this paper, we analyze the argumentation potential of weblog technologies, using a diagnostic framework for argumentation technologies. We pay special attention to the conversation structures and dynamics that weblogs naturally afford. Based on this initial analysis, we make a number of recommendations for research on how to apply these technologies in purposeful conversation processes such as for knowledge management. The copyright of this paper belongs to the paper’s authors. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage.

Blogs are a new form of internet phenomenon and a vast everincreasing information resource. Mining blog files for information is a very new research direction in data mining. We propose to include the title, body, and comments of the blog pages in clustering datasets from blog documents. In particular, we argue that the author/reader comments of the blog pages may have more discriminating effect in clustering blog documents. We constructed a word-page matrix by downloading blog pages from a well-known website and experimented a k-means clustering algorithm with different weights assigned to the title, body, and comment parts. Our experimental results show that assigning a larger weight value to the blog comments helps the k-means algorithm produce better clustering solutions. The experimental results confirm our hypothesis that the author/reader comments of the blog files are very useful in discriminating blog files.

The attention economy motivates participation in peerproduced sites on the Web like YouTube and Wikipedia. However, this economy appears to break down at work. We studied a large internal corporate blogging community using log files and interviews and found that employees expected to receive attention when they contributed to blogs, but these expectations often went unmet. Like in the external blogosphere, a few people received most of the attention, and many people received little or none. Employees expressed frustration if they invested time and received little or no perceived return on investment. While many corporations are looking to adopt Web-based communication tools like blogs, wikis, and forums, these efforts will fail unless employees are motivated to participate and contribute content. We identify where the attention economy breaks down in a corporate blog community and suggest mechanisms for improvement. Author Keywords Blogging, blog readers, attention economy, workplace,

There are multiple information and social networks among individuals, from telephone to email, web, blog, instant message (IM) and chat networks. Prior work has studied each of these individual networks quite extensively, including telephone networks [7], postal network [20], web communities [17], and so on. Still, what is of great interest is how these networks collide and interact with each other. Each individual has presence in multiple networks and it will be of interest to understand how the references and presence in one affects that in the others. Previously such studies would have been difficult to do since each source of data was often “owned ” by a specific entity. Blogs now provide a unique, public source of data that naturally provides visibility into multiple networks. For example, blog entries cite web pages, blogs have friends and community, as well as blog profiles that have links to email, IM and other networks. In this paper, we use the blogs as a starting point to pull in data about these multiple networks and study how these multiple networks interact with each other. While much of the connections are within specific networks, there is still a wealth of information, structure and form to the connections across these networks as our analyses show. 1.