Beginning blog-ology
Posted: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 6:30 PM by Alan Boyle
Duane Hoffmann / msnbc.com |
Research indicates that blog-reading can be habit-forming. Are you hooked yet?
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Researchers are using experimental tools to study the very thing you're doing now - reading a blog. Among the findings: Checking your blogs can become as habit-forming as checking your e-mail, to such an extent that blog-reading turns into a wired sort of cigarette break.
The study also suggests how to make blog-reading better - and not surprisingly, some of those suggestions are already being put into effect.
The information-science researchers from the University of California at Irvine - Eric Baumer, Mark Sueyoshi and Professor Bill Tomlinson - say their study is the first to focus on how blogs are consumed rather than how they're created and connected. They cite figures from 2006 indicating that 57 million American adults read blogs, and all signs suggest that blog readership is increasing every month.
"While work has been done in areas such as analyzing conversations between blogs ... and applying social network analysis to blogs ... little work has been done examining the role of the reader in the blogging process," they wrote in a paper presented today in Florence, Italy, at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
After the presentation, Tomlinson said the paper was well-received. "People from Blogger and Google were there," he told me from Florence.
In a UC-Irvine news release, Tomlinson said the paper was "really just the beginning" of an effort to analyze how online media readership (or, more accurately, usership) works. "With the rapid expansion of online social media such as Flickr and YouTube, understanding how people consume these media will be vital to understanding their broader social impacts."
The researchers concede that this study is a small beginning, based on qualitative rather than quantitative observations. Fifteen experimental subjects, ranging from 18 to 33 in age, were asked about their blog-reading habits. Of those 15, 12 turned out to be bloggers themselves, and 11 were students - which means the sample couldn't be regarded as representative of the general population, or even the general Internet-using population. Nevertheless, several themes emerged for further investigation.
Habit-forming
Blog reading tended to become a routine almost on a par with "pottering" or "time-wasting" - driven by habit rather than a need to seek out specific content. One 22-year-old student told the researchers that "checking blogs is like checking one's e-mail," while a 24-year-old administrative assistant went even further down that road:
"I don't know if I look forward to [reading blogs] ... I don't really look forward to cigarettes anymore, but it's something that happens through the course of the day that I feel like I might need to do. It just becomes habit, I guess."
The subjects tended to scan their favorite blogs for the top postings in the pile, but didn't make much distinction between an up-to-the-minute post on one blog and a four-day-old post on another - as long as they were on top. The researchers called this "non-chronous" behavior, meaning that little regard was given to the time that the post was published.
The study's blog readers also tended to skim through postings - and they didn't mind much if they missed posts that were farther down the list. The rationale? They could always catch up with the lower posts later.
Age of the 'breader'
The fact that so many of the readers were also bloggers points to another key finding: that the line between creator and consumer is blurring out of existence. The readers said that "being a part" of the community was important to them - for example, by feeling a personal connection with the blog's author (welcome, friend!), or by making insightful comments (add yours below).
Most of the readers felt that the ability to participate in a community of commenters was one of the most important ingredients of a blog. I've certainly found that to be the case, so much so that some folks say they're blogging when they leave comments. As the line continues to blur, bloggers and readers are becoming, um, "breaders." (That word isn't in the study. I wish I could say I thought of it first, but I didn't.)
"Future work should examine the feeling of 'being a part' both in different social media, such as YouTube or Wikipedia, as well as in instances where the division between authors and readers is more nebulous or even nonexistent, such as social networking sites or Twitter," the researchers wrote.
Making blogging better
The researchers noted that user-friendly content tools such as Blogger and Movable Type have made writing a blog easy for a wide audience.
"But until the technology embraces the role of the audience, the full social potential of blogging remains untapped," Baumer said in today's news release. "One of the goals of this research is to stimulate the development of tools to foster that social potential in terms of both readers and bloggers."
One potential tool for blog-readers might be a software add-on that tracked their own reading habits, pointing up patterns they might not see otherwise. Bloggers, meanwhile, could set up logging tools to help them distinguish between different types of readers - and devise strategies for connecting better with their audiences.
I followed up on those suggestions with an e-mail asking about further implications for the blogging trade, and Baumer wrote back from Florence:
"I think there are two sets of implications. One set deals with the design of tools to support blog reading. Since this is still exploratory, we don't have any specific, concrete 'design recommendations,' but rather interesting areas for applications. The facilitation of richer, more nuanced interactions between bloggers and readers is, I think, a big one.
"Another one that I will likely be pursuing is developing tools to encourage reflection and critical engagement. We mention in the paper that blog reading often ends up being habitual and routinized. Readers were very reflective about why they read, but not so much what or how. I'm really interested in developing tools to jostle readers out of their routines, to get them to think critically not just about what is being said by the blogger's words, but what is between and behind the words."
I also asked Baumer whether there might be better ways of measuring engagement or usership than just counting the page views. Were there other metrics that could come into play, or other ways to differentiate between types of blog readers? Here's how he answered:
"Potentially. The biggest splits come along lines of motivation. Was the reader keeping up on a friend, strengthening offline connections, looking for information or news, or something else?
"I agree that page views are a really impoverished metric. One might think about looking at comments, but in some cases we found that people were really hesitant to comment if they didn't feel they had anything to contribute.
"One could envision a sort of lo-fi feedback system, allowing readers to give the blogger a 'thumbs up' or similar positive feedback without having to compose a complete, well-thought-out comment."
Lots of folks are already using those sorts of feedback tools - starting with Slashdot's "meta-moderation" system and moving on to the one-click, thumbs-up system employed by sites ranging from Digg to Newsvine (which was recently purchased by msnbc.com).
Newsvine also makes an effort to "grow" on you - by bringing you into a community, developing cybercafes and giving a column to each user. Users who improve their reputation gain more status ("Vineacity") with time.
Further blurring the line between bloggers and readers, WordPress blogs can offer a feature that lets readers rate the comments of others, known as Comment Karma.
Have you seen other features that could come in handy for the next generation of online interaction? Use the comment box below to share your recommendations as well as your own blog-ological research reports. I'm relying on all you "breaders" to help me out here!
Update for 7:15 p.m. ET: Of course you're religiously checking every posting in Cosmic Log ... but just in case the researchers are correct and you've passed over today's other post, give a second look to "Doomsday and Other Double-Takes."
