UC Irvine ブロガー・アンケート結果

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

Blog Survey Findings

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

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

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

Sending International Email

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

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:

1. Principles of Survey Research: Turning Lemons into Lemonade
2. Principles of Survey Research: Designing a Survey
3. Principles of Survey Research: Constructing a Survey Instrument
4. Principles of Survey Research: Questionnaire Evaluation
5. Principles of Survey Research: Populations and Samples
6. Principles of Survey Research: Data Analysis

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

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:

1. Added our blog to feedster, technorati and various other listing sites
2. Asked people to link our blog from their blog; this was done via:
1. email
2. irc-channels devoted to bloggers
3. blogging forums
3. Created a blogroll containing some high-profile bloggers, in the hopes that they'd stumble upon our own blog
4. Posted our blog link on monkeyfilter (albeit, this was a partial failure *blush*)
5. Added trackback

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