NTU Natural Language Processing Lab. 1 Investment and Attention in the Weblog Community Advisor: Hsin-Hsi Chen Speaker: Sheng-Chung Yen

NTU Natural Language Processing Lab. 2 Agenda Introduction Goals Related Work Weblog Structure Design and Methodology Result Conclusion References

NTU Natural Language Processing Lab. 3 Introduction The weblog medium has grown out, the social and behavioral aspects of this emerging practice represent a large shift towards a new form of interaction. What distinguished weblogging from previous web media is the extent to which it is social.

NTU Natural Language Processing Lab. 4 Goals This paper seeks to understand the social implications of hypertext links within the community, both from a systemic view of the entire network and also form the perspective of individual authors.

NTU Natural Language Processing Lab. 5 Related Work Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication Its focus is social science research on computer- mediated communication via the Internet, the World Wide Web, and wireless technologies. [2]

NTU Natural Language Processing Lab. 6 Weblog Structure Bloggers’ hypertext links Static links: a form of readership. Dynamic links: implying discourse or interaction around a particular topic. They refer to weblog interconnections as a Readership Network.

NTU Natural Language Processing Lab. 7 Design and Methodology(1/2) Sample: Directories Spidering Application Ping server ex: Blo.gs Aggregator Corpus collection Selecting English blogs

NTU Natural Language Processing Lab. 8 Design and Methodology(2/2) Survey: This survey will take advantage –Random sample –Self-selected sample Weblog Use –# of other sites read. –# of posts per week. –# of comments made on other weblogs. –The total time invested during an average week. Links –Social categories (weblog, weblog post, personal homepage) –The type of relationship the author had with the alter: friend, family, acquaintance, or “don’t know them personally.” –When they had last read the site? –When they had last posted a comment on it? –When they had met the author in person?

NTU Natural Language Processing Lab. 9 Result During the months of May and June Over the 37 day period, over 15 million links were extracted from about 1 million weblogs.

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NTU Natural Language Processing Lab. 13 Result It is clear that there is a strong relationship between the frequency of posting and a weblog’s in-degree, and more-so for dynamic links than static.

NTU Natural Language Processing Lab. 14 Result Survey to the random sample subjects. Publicized on a number of popular weblogs. Sample Random LiveJournal Self-selected Sex: 0  male, 1  female Education: 0  “less than High School”, 6  a graduate degree.

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NTU Natural Language Processing Lab. 17 Result The more popular weblogs inspire their authors to invest more time, or the invested time could be rewarded with larger audiences and more frequent comments.

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NTU Natural Language Processing Lab. 21 Conclusion The observation of a strong relationship between investment in the weblog and payoff in terms of audience size and feedback. As I anticipated, these measures of investment were shown to correlate very strongly with measures of attention and audience size. These data show that the weblog community rewards the author who puts time into their work, and that the length of one’s blogging history does not solely determine their future audience.

NTU Natural Language Processing Lab. 22 References [1] C. Marlow, Investment and attention in the weblog community, Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs, [2] Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication,