This piece focuses on corporate blogging, but maybe we can apply it to our setting, no?
The following excerpted from:
Chau, Michael and Jennifer Xu. "Mining communities and their relationships in blogs: A study of online hate groups." International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 65(1). January 2007. 57-70.
"2.1. Blogging
Blogs have become increasingly popular in the past few years. In the early days, blogs, a short form of weblogs, were used mainly for pages where links to other useful resources were periodically “logged” and posted. At that time blogs were mostly maintained by hand (Blood, 2004). After easy-to-use blogging software became widely available in the early 2000s, the nature of blogs has changed and many blogs are more like personal Web sites that contain various types of content (not limited to links) posted in reverse-chronological order. Bloggers often make a record of their lives and express their opinions, feelings, and emotions through writing blogs (Nardi et al., 2004). Many bloggers consider blogging as an outlet for their thoughts and emotions. Besides personal blogs, there are also blogs created by companies. For example, ice.com, an online jewelry seller, has launched three blogs and reported that thousands of people linked to their Web site from these blogs (Hof, 2005).
One of the most important features in blogs is the ability for any reader to write a comment on a blog entry. On most blog hosting sites, it is very easy to write a comment, in a way quite similar to replying to a previous message in traditional discussion forums. The ability to comment on blogs has facilitated the interaction between bloggers and their readers. On some controversial issues, like those related to racism, it is not uncommon to find a blog entry with thousands of comments where people dispute back and forth on the matter.
Cyber communities have also emerged in blogs. Communities in blogs can be categorized as explicit communities or implicit communities, like some other cyber communities on the Web (Kumar et al., 1999). Explicit communities in blogs are the groups, or blogrings, that bloggers have explicitly formed and joined. Most blog hosting sites allow bloggers to form a new group or join any existing groups. On the other hand, implicit communities can only be defined by the interactions among bloggers, such as subscription, linking, or commenting. For example, a blogger may subscribe to another blog, meaning that the subscriber can get updates when the subscribed blog has been updated. A blogger can also post a link or add a comment to another blog, which are perhaps the most traditional activities among bloggers. These interactions signify some kind of connection between two bloggers. Because of such interactions among bloggers, these communities are less similar to the cyber communities as discussed in Kumar et al. (1999) but more resembling to the virtual communities which involve the social interaction between members characterized by memberships, sense of belonging, relationships, shared values and practices, and self-regulation (Erickson, 1997; Roberts, 1998; Rheingold, 2000). Similar to the analysis of hyperlinks among Web pages to identify communities (Chau et al., 2005a and Chau et al., 2005b), analysis of the connections between bloggers could also identify these virtual communities, their characteristics, and their relationships...
[...]
2.3. Hate on the Internet
Hate crimes have been one of the long-standing problems in the United States because of various historical, cultural, and political reasons. Race, gender, religion, and disability often become the reason of hate. Over time, hate groups have been formed to unite individuals with similar beliefs as well as to spread such ideology. For example, White supremacist groups such as Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Neo-Nazis, and Racist Skinheads have been active in the United States for a long time (Burris et al., 2000).
Hate groups have been increasingly using the Internet to express their ideas, spread their beliefs, and recruit new members (Lee and Leets, 2002). It has been reported that 60% of hate criminals are youths (Levin and McDevitt, 1993), who are, perhaps unfortunately, also one of the largest groups of Internet users. Glaser et al. (2002) suggest that racists often express their views more freely on the Internet. The Hate Directory (Franklin, 2005) compiles a list of hundreds of Web sites, files archives, newsgroups, and other Internet resources related to hate and racism. Several studies have investigated Web sites that are related to racism or White supremacy. Douglas et al. (2005) studied 43 Web sites that were related to White supremacy. It was found that while these groups showed lower level of advocated violence due to legal constraints, they exhibited high levels of social conflict and social creativity. Lee and Leets (2002) found that storytelling-style, implicit messages often used by hate groups on the Internet were more persuasive to adolescents, who have become the target of new member recruitment of many hate groups. These adolescences might be easily influenced to conduct hate crimes. Gerstenfeld et al. (2003) conducted a manual analysis of 157 extremist Web sites. They found that some hate Web sites were associated with hate groups while others were maintained by individuals. Many of these sites had links to other extremist sites or hate group sites, showing that some of these groups are linked to each other. Burris et al. (2000) systematically analyzed the networks of Web sites maintained by white supremacist groups and found that this network had a decentralized structure with several centers of influence. In addition, communities were present in this network in which groups sharing similar interests and ideologies tended to be closely connected. Zhou et al. (2005) used software to automate the analysis of the content of hate group Web sites and the linkage among them. They found that one of the major objectives of these Web sites was to share ideology. Cyber communities such as White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis were identified among these sites. Recent years have seen the emergence of hate groups in blogs, where high-narrative messages are the norm. This has made blogs an ideal medium for spreading hatred. Blogs have also made it possible for individuals to find others with similar belief and ideology much more easily. As a result, hate groups have emerged in blogs.
To study these online hate groups in blogs, it is important to analyze the content of these blogs as well as the relationships among the bloggers. However, because of the large volume of data involved, it is often a mentally exhausting, if not infeasible, process to perform such kind of analysis manually."
The following are two vids from YouTube, part of a collection of short clips where "experts" are asked the simple question: "What is a Blog?"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=rx4NboDvXnw - Leonardo Chiariglione
http://youtube.com/watch?v=htP1NzSj1tY - Teemu Arina
S0: you've got some different materials up here. In a blog entry, write two to three hundred words of what you think a blog is, should, could be.
1 comment:
yeah for class blogs!
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