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The role of the author in topical blogs

Published: 02 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Web logs, or blogs, challenge the notion of authorship. Seemingly, rather than a model in which the author's writings are themselves a contribution, the blog author weaves a tapestry of links, quotations, and references amongst generated content. In this paper, I present a study of the role of the author plays in the construction of topical blogs, in particular focusing on how blog authors make decisions about what to post and how they judge the quality of posts. To this end, I analyzed the blogs and blogging habits of eight participants using a quantitative analysis tool that I developed, a diary study, and interviews with each participant. Results suggest that authors of topical blogs often do not create new content but strive to, often follow journalistic conventions, use the content of their blogs as a reference tool for other work practices, and are connected as a community by a set of source documents. Results also show that Instant Messaging is useful as an interview medium when questions center around online content.

References

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J. Boyle. Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society. Harvard University Press, 1996.
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S. Herring, L. Scheidt, S. Bonus, and E. Wright. Bridging the gap: A genre analysis of weblogs. In Proceedings of HICSS, 2004.
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B. A. Nardi, D. J. Schiano, and M. Gumbrecht. Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary? In Proceedings of CSCW, pages 222--231, 2004.
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D. J. Schiano, B. A. Nardi, M. Gumbrecht, and L. Swartz. Blogging by the rest of us. In Extended abstracts of CHI, pages 1143--1146, 2004.
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A. Voida, E. D. Mynatt, T. Erickson, and W. A. Kellogg. Interviewing over instant messaging. In Proceedings of CHI, pages 1344--1347, 2004.

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  • (2017)Qualitative data analysis of disaster risk reduction suggestions assisted by topic modeling and word2vec2017 International Conference on Asian Language Processing (IALP)10.1109/IALP.2017.8300601(293-297)Online publication date: Dec-2017
  • (2012)A blog considered from the perspectives of social practice theoryProceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Companion10.1145/2141512.2141588(243-246)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2012
  • (2010)Watching the watchers: “voluntary monitoring” of infosec employeesInformation Management & Computer Security10.1108/0968522101103523218:1(14-25)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2010
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '05: CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2005
    1358 pages
    ISBN:1595930027
    DOI:10.1145/1056808
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 02 April 2005

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    Author Tags

    1. authorship
    2. blogs
    3. content analysis
    4. qualitative methods

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2017)Qualitative data analysis of disaster risk reduction suggestions assisted by topic modeling and word2vec2017 International Conference on Asian Language Processing (IALP)10.1109/IALP.2017.8300601(293-297)Online publication date: Dec-2017
    • (2012)A blog considered from the perspectives of social practice theoryProceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Companion10.1145/2141512.2141588(243-246)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2012
    • (2010)Watching the watchers: “voluntary monitoring” of infosec employeesInformation Management & Computer Security10.1108/0968522101103523218:1(14-25)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2010
    • (2009)Weblog as a personal thinking spaceProceedings of the 20th ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia10.1145/1557914.1557963(289-298)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2009
    • (2008)Playground gamesProceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems10.1145/1394445.1394453(68-77)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2008
    • (2007)On context of contentCHI '07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/1240866.1241074(2753-2758)Online publication date: 28-Apr-2007

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