Prospecting the Blogosphere

China Blog Research Center talked about our study (in Chinese)

2005-06-10T23:08:00.000-04:00

China Blog Research Center recently talked about the results of our blog survey in its website:
http://research.blogchina.com/1820345.html

UC Irvine ブロガー・アンケート結果

2005-06-09T03:13:00.000-04:00

日本人だったら、moondialのﾌﾞﾛｸﾞを見てください：

http://moondial.blog2.fc2.com/blog-entry-97.html

博客调查的结果

2005-06-06T02:51:00.000-04:00

我们的博客调查的结果发表在两篇国际会议论文中(2005国际社区与技术大会, 2005国际社会智能设计大会)。你可以在下面下载这两篇文章（英文）。简单的说,这两篇论文从以下四个方面比较博客社区:积极性,声誉,社会联系性,身份。第一篇论文比较不同文化背景下的博客社区，第二篇论文比较不同主题类型的博客（政治与个人）。比如，在第一篇论文中，我们调查研究发现日本博客比其他国家的博客更注意隐藏他们的真实身份。在第二篇论文中，我们调查发现政治博客比个人博客具有更强的社会联系性。如果你只想知道一个大概，那么你可以只读论文的介绍和结论部分（就像绝大多数研究人员那样）。

这份问卷调查的准备离不开我们聪明的伙伴们：Jon Froehlich, Brandon Herdrick, Xuefei Fan, Kelly H. Kim，Louise Barkhuus。我们都是戈丽亚博士所教授的数量统计课的一部份，我们之间的合作十分的愉快。最后，我们特别要感谢帮助我们宣传这个问卷的朋友和所有博客朋友们，你们反馈的意见和建设性的批评使我们受益匪浅。

如果你对我们的博客调查有任何的疑问，请先从我们的两篇论文中寻找答案。如果你仍有任何的意见或问题，请在这里留下你的意见，或是直接写电子邮件给我们：normsu or yangwang [at] ics [dot] uci [dot] edu。我们将在这里或通过电邮回复你。

海内存知己，天涯若比邻：博客是一个全球社区吗?
作者：Norman Makoto Su, Yang Wang, Gloria Mark, Tosin Aiyelokun, Tadashi Nakano

摘要：基于因特网的信息通讯技术如用户网，网络聊天，多用户网络游戏已经使虚拟社区成为现实。然而，一种新的技术形式，网罗日志（网志或博客）已经迅速成为一种自我表达和跨越地域分享知识的方式。以前的研究主要侧重于西方国家的博客，我们的调查却是面向全球的博客社区。之前的研究发现技术的使用因文化背景而大不相同。在这个发现的启发下，我们做了一个问卷调查旨在探索地域的文化对全球博客社区的影响。我们提出这个研究的问题：是博客所在的地域文化，还是一个“全球化”的因特网文化，会对博客对于博客社区的感受影响大一些？我们在全球范围内开展了一个多语言的网络调查，我们收到了来自全球四大洲的1232个有效回复。我们虽然发现微小的差别存在于东西方的文化下，但是大体的说全球的博客社区却被一个因特网文化所统治，因为没有跨文化的显著差别（注意：这里的差别大小是基于统计意义上的）。然而，一个重要的特例是日本博客特别注重隐藏他们的真实身份。

博客中一如往常的政治
作者：Norman Makoto Su, Yang Wang, Gloria Mark

摘要：近几年来，网罗日志（或称博客）的崛起，正在改变人们在因特网上的交流。政治主题和个人主题的两种博客变得格外的流行。这两种类型的博客都形成了作者与读者的社区。在这篇论文中我们研究社区这个概念是如何在这两种博客中被表达的。我们比较这两种博客在社区方面的区别。我们侧重于有关社区的四个方面：积极性,声誉,社会联系性,身份。我们在全球范围内开展了一个多语言的网络调查，我们收到了来自全球四大洲的1232个有效回复（其中有121个政治博客和593个个人博客）。我们在这两个类型的博客中发现了显著差别（注意：这里的差别大小是基于统计意义上的）。

Blog Survey Findings

2005-06-02T23:34:00.000-04:00

The blog survey has resulted in two published papers for 2005, one in the Communities and Technologies (C&T) conference and another in the Social Intelligence Design (SID). You can download the full papers (pdf) below. Briefly, both papers compare blogging communities on four dimensions: activism, reputation, social connectedness and identity. The C&T paper compares blogging communities from different cultures, while the SID paper compares across genres (political versus personal). So for example, a question we addressed in the C&T paper was whether bloggers in Japan, for example hide their identity on blogs more readily than bloggers in other countries (yes). A question we addressed in the SID paper was whether political bloggers are more social connected than personal bloggers (yes). If you just want a quick summary, read the introduction and conclusion (most researchers do the same anyways).

The survey development process would not have been possible without some very smart people: Jon Froehlich, Brandon Herdrick, Xuefei Fan, Kelly H. Kim and Louise Barkhuus. They were all part of a quantitative statistics class taught by Gloria, and it was truly an enjoyable experience to work with them. Finally, I want to especially thank all the bloggers who took time out to answer unsolicited emails from annoying graduate students. Many of your provided us insightful advice and constructive criticism.

If you have any questions, please first refer to the full papers. If you still have comments or inquiries, please don't hesitate to leave a comment here, or email us directly: normsu or yangwang [at] ics [dot] uci [dot] edu. We'll address your issues here or by email.

A Bosom Buddy Afar Brings a Distant Land Near: Are Bloggers a Global Community?
Norman Makoto Su, Yang Wang, Gloria Mark, Tosin Aiyelokun, Tadashi Nakano

Abstract. Information communication technologies on the Internet such as Usenet, Internet relay chats and multi-user dungeons have been used to enable virtual communities. However, a new form of technology, the weblog, or “blog”, has quickly risen as a means for self-expression and sharing knowledge for people across geographic distance. Though studies have focused on blogs in Western countries, our study targets the global blogging community. Inspired by previous studies that show significant differences in technology practices across cultures, we conducted a survey to investigate the influence of regional culture on a blogging community. We asked the research question of whether bloggers are more influenced by their local cultures with respect to their sense of community, or rather whether a “universal” Internet culture is a stronger influence of community feeling. Our results, based on a multilingual worldwide blogging survey of 1232 participants from four continents show that while smaller differences could be found between Eastern and Western cultures, overall the global blogging community is indeed dominated by an Internet culture that shows no profound differences across cultures. However, one significant exception was found in Japanese bloggers and their concealment of identity.

Politics as Usual in the Blogosphere
Norman Makoto Su, Yang Wang, Gloria Mark

Abstract. In recent years, the emergence of weblogs, commonly known as blogs, are changing the way that people interact over the Internet. Two particular kinds of blogs have become particularly popular—political and personal /hobby oriented blogs. Each of these types of blogs foster a community of readers and writers. In this paper, we investigate how the notion of community is expressed through these two blog genres. We examine the differences between community aspects in political and personal blogs. We focus on four dimensions that are associated with community: activism, reputation, social connectedness and identity. Our results, based on a multilingual worldwide blogging survey of 121 political and 593 personal /hobby bloggers from four continents show significant differences in blogging practices across these genres.

Monster Blogs

2004-08-22T22:26:00.000-04:00

A big thanks to kotori (which means "little bird" in Japanese) for mentioning (babelfish translation link) our survey. When I emailed him about the blog survey, he mentioned that his site is a "monster blog". So that's what popular blogs are called in Japan? I suppose terms like blogerrati (i.e., celebrity or popular bloggers) are not extensively used in Japanese.

Are there other unique terms you know of for popular blogs/bloggers around the world?

Here is our current tally:

Japanese: 164
Chinese (simplified): 124
Chinese (traditional): 33
Korean: 22

We'll soon be collecting the data and then start the ~~hard~~ fun part...analysis.

Chatango

2004-08-15T19:09:00.000-04:00

I've added a link to the left so that you can chat with me if I'm online.

Sending International Email

2004-08-11T01:29:00.000-04:00

Its always great to get email from bloggers about what they think of our survey.

moondial told me:

In that case it would be best to write this message in Japanese with its subject line also in Japanese; most of the virus protection software settings over here throws away messages only in single-byte alpha-numerals. Likewise, many blogs do not accept alpha-numerals only comments, as many are sent in by spammers.

I have a nagging fear that all the emails I've been sending to Asian language speakers have been forwarded to /dev/null due to spam filters. Egads! All that wasted effort. Also, what encoding do I use for emails? I've always loved utf-8 for its uniformity, but perhaps not all mail readers support it.

As I mentioned before, blogging != diary:

I myself consider blogging tool set to be a handy contents management system rather than a journaling medium, and consequently my entries are more or less a collection of little essays each focusing on a particular topic. And therefore my, weblog has a considerably small readership.

I think blogging is also attractive because of its slightly voyeuristic angle. Its what drives intelligent people to watch stupid people do stupid things on (reality) television. But, I think blogging is set apart in that mundane events are common. Mundane to them, but nevertheless comforting to know that someone else out there has nothing to do on a Friday night.

Principles of Survey Research

2004-08-09T21:50:00.000-04:00

If any of you are planning to do a survey, I highly recommend you check out a series of six papers (six in all) from the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes:

I also find some class slides on the papers. I wish I had read this series before we started working on the survey--it would've saved us a load of headaches.

Let's talk about something specific: Likert Scales. For those of you who are not familiar with them, here's an example:

Indicate to what degree you agree or disagree with the below statement :
1.) I prefer using Linux to Windows.

|Strongly Disagree|Disagree|Neither Agree nor Disagree|Agree|Strongly Agree|

Kitchenham and Pfleegar in part 6 of the series call answers to the above questions ordinal data. Can we treat orindal data as nominal data? In other words, can I simply convert the above (e.g., strongly disagree = 0, strongly agree = 0) example into a number scale and perform the standard ANOVA? ANOVA is a staple of HCI research. It will tell you if you can, with confidence, state that differences between two means are a result of some treatment and not just random effects.

From the paper: "In general, if our data are single peaked and approximately Normal, our risks of misanalysis are low if we convert to numerical values."

So, I guess using F-test + post-hoc tests like Bonferonni are OK to use if the results seem to have some sort of bell shape. What do you do if you don't have such a shape? You can try converting values (multiple/divide by a factor, take the log, etc.) or if the shape is bimodal, trying to split the data further. Any other tips people have? In fact, I haven't really found a paper or book that will tell you--1) first run this test for normality, 2) if it meets this threshold, then you can safely use the F-test. Any pointers? I'm wondering, is a Chi-squared test appropriate for Likert scales as well?

-*-

Some minor corrections to our blog were pointed out by moondial [japanese only]. We were inconsistenly spelling the word blog in Japanese. The Japanese language allows one to explictly specify a glottal stop (a sort of hesitation, or pause)...sometimes its hard for me to correctly find whether an English word should have a glottal stop at a certain place when it is translated to Japanese. burogu or burrogu (the double r indicates the glottal stop)? Correct answer: burogu

A Little Bird Told Me

2004-08-04T00:05:00.000-04:00

Its hard to find material when the subject of your blog is about a survey. Here's a topic: how does one best advertise a blog?

I think most blogs become famous because they are updated frequently and have high quality material. However, is there something more you can do to give your blog more visibility? Here's a few things we did:

Added our blog to feedster, technorati and various other listing sites
Asked people to link our blog from their blog; this was done via:

email
irc-channels devoted to bloggers
blogging forums

Created a blogroll containing some high-profile bloggers, in the hopes that they'd stumble upon our own blog
Posted our blog link on monkeyfilter (albeit, this was a partial failure *blush*)
Added trackback

Any other suggestions? BTW, we still need more Chinese, Japanese and Korean bloggers to fill our survey. Show us some Asian pride.

Goals

2004-07-28T23:01:00.000-04:00

Here's the running count:

Chinese (simplified): 94
Chinese (traditional): 23
Japanese: 58
Korean: 21
English (non-Flash version): 166

I've been contacting various Korean bloggers, but their numbers still seem low. Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world, so I must be doing something wrong. Any ideas? Or do they just play StarCraft with all that bandwidth?

On another note, it's really tough getting the popular bloggers to respond. This is understandable, since they are busy and probably get a whole of bunch of emails, but, nevertheless, it is frustrating. I'll keep trying. I've been posting to blogger forums as well--we'll see how that goes.

Someone asked me what our time frame is and how many participants we need. Well, ideally, we'd like 1,000 participants for each survey. At the very minimum, 500. Maybe I'm being too hopeful...

According to this article in Asia Times Online, "China has seen a significant rise in the number of web logs with an estimated 10,000 active bloggers and more than 600 web logs". Let's use statistics. Suppose I want to be have a 95% confidence level and a confidence interval of 10. Assuming a normal distribution, independent sampling, we need about 100 people to answer the survey. In other words, if 25% of people answered "yes" to a particular question in our survey, we can be 95% sure that 15 to 35% (25-10, 25+10, respectively) of the total population would've said "yes" as well. On the other hand, if I want to reduce that interval to 20 to 30% (an interval of 5), I would need about 400 participants. You can calculate this here and here's an easy to understand slide [powerpoint] about confidence intervals.

As for the time frame, we'd like to get results by the end of August, so that we can analyze them in September. As usual, comments and advice are welcome. Special thanks to Mengjuei for helping to clean up the traditional Chinese version of our blog survey. Zot! Zot!

A rose is a rose is a rose

2004-07-21T21:09:00.000-04:00

In email correspondence, Isaac Mao told us:

Basically I'd like to take the survey, however, the Chinese name of "blogger" is not correct. So it will cause many confusion to take it...It never use the "Bo Ke" (your translation of "Blogger"). With this name, people even can't distinguish "Blog" and "Blogger" in context.

I'm not convinced yet that the word or concept of blog is fully mainstream, even in America. I just had a conversation with my mother (who is no slouch with the computer) a few days ago trying to explain what a blog is. If you use words like "online diary", people will start to understand what a blog is, yet blogs come in many forms ("diary" implies "personal", which not all blogs are). Sometimes, for those of us not familiar with blogs in other countries, it is not a trivial task trying to find what the de-facto word for blog is.

In the Chinese case, we looked on the Chinese Wikipedia and choose what seemed to be the word for blog, but we were wrong and Isaac graciously pointed out the error, which we corrected.

I asked Isaac if I could talk about our correspondence on my blog, and he gave me the a-okay. Yet, ironically enough, China has blocked access to *.blogspot.com since 1/2003, so he can't even read about himself. Now, I won't get political here and impose the America-is-all-great-democracy-rules view on other countries, but I humbly believe that such a blanket policy of blocking an entire domain name serves little purpose.

-*-
Our current tally is at:

Chinese: 78
Japanese: 47
Korean: 18

Thank you all for your tips and hints on spreading the survey; keep 'em coming. Please ask people to take the survey--tell them its the cool thing to do now and that if you don't take it your friends will mock you for not joining the bandwagon.

Anyone know who the bloggerati (popular bloggers) in Korea and Japan are?

Implementation

2004-07-16T09:53:00.000-04:00

First of all, thanks for all your suggestions on how I can help disseminate the survey further. The advice I've received has been very helpful.

Let's talk about implementation. Our survey was split into two phases. Originally a class project for Quantitative Research Methods in Computer Science, the first phase consisted of creating an English version of the survey. The process of creating the questions is described in my previous entry. When it came down to implementation, due to time constraints, we opted to use a commercial program: Quask FormArtist. It has a nice WYSIWYG GUI for creating surveys. However, it lacks support for Asian languages and has some quirky interface problems (especially when creating macros). The later point, we could live with, but we needed to eventually write Asian versions of the survey.

For phase 2, I implemented the survey in the best language in the whole wide world. For a database, I used SQLite. SQLite is a really nice, lightweight database--if you need a quick and dirty way to store data with ACID transactions, I highly recommend it. There is a ruby binding for SQLite, whose usage is explained beautifully by why the lucky stiff. Basically, we have an Apache server with the modruby module installed that allows ruby scripts to be executed natively (reducing startup times). I use eruby to imbed ruby syntax into an html file which generates surveys from a specially formatted textfile (four versions, one for each language). So, for example, I might have:

I love to:
[] Eat sushi
[] Eat bulgogi
[] Eat Peking duck
[]_ Other:
[]* None of the above

The ruby script file will see that the question is []: in a checkbox format, _: should have a fill in field for "Other:" and *: should make "None of the above" an exclusive answer. A similar syntax is used for radio button formats and fill in questions. Javascript handles things like dynamically greying out the other choices when "None of the above" is chosen.

That in a nutshell is how we implemented the survey. I'm amazed that there isn't some freeware survey making software tool out there (though I did find some freeware services, that unfortunately are very much crippled without payment). Perhaps, when I have time, I'll try to develop a general framework for making surveys. Anyone else have experiences developing surveys?

Bias

2004-07-14T09:54:00.000-04:00

Some people [1,2] have commented on the classical sociology problem of self-selection bias. By advertising our survey and relying on the goodwill of people for replies, we are essentially reducing our sample to represent only those people who are willing to do surveys. Does this sample represent bloggers on the whole? That is something we can never claim with absolute certainty. Things like comparing demographics, etc. of the target population with the sample can help support such an assertion.

Surveys have their disadvantages in that they are inflexible. Unstructured interviews and field studies are some alternatives. I recommend you all read Bonnie Nardi's paper on blogging. In that study, she focuses a select group of bloggers, noting their behavior, analyzing their blogs and interviewing them in person. Some of our survey questions are directly gleaned from results of that paper.

Another commenter stated that the survey doesn't take into account for the fact that some people primarily participate in a group blog (is that what they are called?). In other words, several people contribute to a single blog. We had to narrow our focus to just the opinions of bloggers; if we had wanted to find out how group dynamics play a role (how do bloggers of the same group blog differ/relate to each other?), then a different set of questions might've been necessary (like requiring participants to write what blogsite they write on). A separate study on group blogs would certainly be interesting; I suspect there are already studies that have been done on this (any pointers?).
-*-
We're nearing 1000 hits on our survey page. Obviously, we don't have 1000 participants, but I'm amazed at the spike in hits lately. Unfortunately, we are still in desperate need of people to fill out the Chinese, Japanese and Korean surveys. Right now, we have:

China: 7
Japan: 38
Korea: 17

(these don't include Asian language speakers who filled out the English survey)

How and where can I find more Asian bloggers? Do you know any forums, bulletin boards, or particular blogs I can post to? Perhaps I should try pursuing some of the Chinese blog links...

The Trials & Tribulations of Survey Making

2004-07-12T09:57:00.000-04:00

Lisa, in a comment , mentioned that

on question #11 -- "does blogging connect me with more people like me" It does, but for me one of the important things about blogging is that it connects me with people *not* like me.

I think she's right. A lot of times bloggers will meet new people they perhaps otherwise would not have met through other means. Perhaps, we should've rephrased the question simply as "I have become more connected with people". That is a different kind of question (though interesting one) from #11.

But let me tell you--survey making is a tough process. And, if you want something interesting, shocking or provocative to come out of a survey and into a nice conference paper, you have to think up of questions that are conducive to interesting analysis. The process was roughly:

1.) We (the graduate students) came up with a myriad of hypotheses that we though were interesting.
2.) From these hypotheses, we developed questions and spoke with professors.

I think, we ended up with nearly 100 candidate questions! They all seemed so good and we each had our "favorite" questions. The most difficult part was in pruning the questions. This was done by:

1.) Each grad student marked out questions they thought could be done away.
2.) We met at a soup and sandwich joint, and went through each question that was marked. We argued and pleaded our case, and then a final vote was done to the question's fate.

Coordinating a project with a large number of participants is a difficult process. However, I think this is more than made up by the stimulation you get from so many different minds.

As with a software project, the design is the toughest part. Implementation is easier (though still tough, I'll talk about that in another post). I'd be interested to hear what other people's processes are when they create surveys. How do you come up with the format? How are initial questions formed? I found that previous surveys were a great help.

On another front, some people have graciously referenced our survey in their blogs:
yuuriblog [jp]
Joho the Blog [en]
Luca Pattaro #weblog# [it]

Anyhow, please do keep spreading the survey around. It'll make our data that much more effective.

Our Blog Survey

2004-07-07T22:56:00.000-04:00

Hi, welcome to our blog. Do you write a blog? If so, please take our survey. It is available in English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Full details can be found at:

http://drzaius.ics.uci.edu/blogsurvey

It should take at most 15 minutes. Most people finish it sooner, and many of our participants commented that the questions we interesting and enlightening. Plus, since we will publically publish our results, you'll be contributing to a wider understanding of what blogging means to different cultures!

To maximize the validity of our survey results, we need as many responses as possible (ideally several hundred) from as wide range a demographic as possible. Most importantly, we need more results from different countries. Right now, we are lacking responses from non-English speakers. Additionally, we are very interested in responses from English speakers who don't reside in the United States. Of course, we very much welcome those in the US to still fill out the survey. =)

This blog is basically meant to help spread the word. Interestingly, when we asked people to fill out our blog survey, they often asked us back, "do you have a blog?" So here it is--we'll keep you updated soon on how many people have filled out each survey, as well as on our thoughts on the analysis of the data.

Please feel free to leave comments. We are really interested in hearing what you think of our survey. Help propagate the survey through the "blogosphere"--post it in your entries and forward it to your friends. Thanks!