November 26, 2004
Cameron Marlow: "Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community"
Marlow, Cameron. 2004. "Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community" Presented at the International Communication Association Conference. New Orleans, LA.
Synopsis:
Marlow analyzes blogging from the perspective of link structure, considering how authority is manifested within the community through links as a proxy for social structure. He is employing social network analysis as a method for understanding the relationship structure.
"While some of these webloggers identify with the progenitors of the medium, others feel that their practice is distinct from that form." (1)
Measures of authority: popularity (webloggers' public affiliations) and influence (citation of each others' writing).
"Network analysis is well suited for the study of weblogs as many of the socialrelationships between weblog authors are explicitly stated in the form of hypertext links." (2)
Discussion of Clay Shirky's power law curves and assumptions that every weblogger wanted to be recognized as a opinion leader.
"The remainder of this paper will explore thisquestion in depth, namely what a link to a weblog means, the different types of social links that can occur, and how to understand authority in this social environment." (3)
Marlow defines Weblog Social Ties through blogrolls, permalinks, comments and trackbacks before introducing Blogdex methodology and data.
In the bulk of the paper, Marlow discusses various data that he acquired. The key finding shows that older well-known bloggers do not continue to have influence. Although their names are known (and they are regularly blogrolled), what they write is not regularly linked to, indicating a lower influence rate.
Reflections:
Although Marlow introduces some of the pitfalls of power laws, he only seeks to address a key one - that the "rich get richer" is not accurate. He does a great job of showing how Blogdex's research database is quite rich but he doesn't unpack the differences between social networks and link structure in blogs. He doesn't really dive into how using this as a proxy for authority might be confounding various issues or how blogrolls are a signaling mechanism first and foremost, particularly for those who want to signal participation in a particular subgroup of bloggers.
Category: blogging
Posted by zephoria at November 26, 2004 5:53 PM
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