BlogForever

A paper with the title “The Blogosphere as Œuvre: Individual and collective influences on bloggers” has been accepted in the European Conference on Information Systems, to be held on 11-13 June 2012 in Barcelona, Spain.

Authors: Hendrik Kalb, Matthias Trier

Abstract: Blogging has often been described as writing an online diary but, nowadays, it is more diverse and a considerable amount of blogs forms a common interconnected resource – the blogosphere – with comprehensive societal impact. While various studies have inquired social-psychological influences on the intention to contribute to an individual blog, the perceptions related to creating such a common valuable good have not yet been focussed. Therefore, we introduce a new construct – the œuvre of blogging – to better account for the notion of the blogosphere as a collective outcome. Furthermore, we propose a research model to inquire the influence of individual and collective beliefs on the œuvre in comparison to short-term blogging activity. We conducted an online survey with 509 international distributed bloggers to test our model. The results of our study provide support for the importance of an œuvre construct to explain influences on bloggers and blogging.

Keywords: Blog, Blogosphere, Collective benefit, PLS, Knowledge Sharing

A paper named “Technological foundations of the current Blogosphere” has been accepted in the International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS’12), to be held on 13-15 June 2012 in Craiova, Romania.

Authors: Vangelis Banos, Karen Stepanyan, Yannis Manolopoulos, Mike Joy and Alexandra Cristea

Abstract: In this paper, we review the technological foundations of the current Blogosphere. The review is primarily based on a large-scale evaluation of active blogs. The extensive list of examined technologies enables commenting on a range of widely adopted standards and potential trends in the Blogosphere. The evaluation has been conducted in the following stages:

1. Retrieving and parsing a large set of blogs
2. Identifying and quantifying the use of technologies such as web standards, adopted services, file formats and platforms.
3. Analysing collected data and reporting the results
4. Comparing the results with existing findings from the generic Web to identify similarities and differences in the Blogosphere.

The presented work was performed as part of BlogForever (ICT No. 269963), an EC funded research project aiming to aggregate, preserve, manage and disseminate blogs. The results of this study are relevant within the context weblog preservation and weblog data extraction.

BlogForever-presentation-2010-11-30