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March 26-28, 2007

Expressing Social Relationships on the Blog through Links and Comments

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Noor Ali-Hasan and Lada Adamic

Blogs, regularly updated online journals, allow people to quickly and easily create and share online content. Most bloggers write about their everyday lives and generally have a small audience of regular readers. Readers interact with bloggers by contributing comments in response to specific blog posts. Moreover, readers of blogs are often bloggers themselves and acknowledge their favorite blogs by adding them to their blogrolls or linking to them in their posts. This paper presents a study of bloggers. online and real life relationships in three blog communities: Kuwait Blogs, Dallas/Fort Worth Blogs, and United Arab Emirates Blogs. Through a comparative analysis of the social network structures created by blogrolls and blog comments, we find different characteristics for different kinds of links. Our online survey of the three communities reveals that few of the blogging interactions reflect close offline relationships, and moreover that many online relationships were formed through blogging.

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posted by ICWSM at 3:03 PM  

5 Comments:

Anonymous said...

This paper was nominated for the ICWSM best paper award.

9:37 AM  
Laura said...

Very interesting. Have you noticed any increase in Arabic language blogging by Kuwaiti, UAE, or other Middle East bloggers? Can you comment on language use?

1:13 PM  
Noor said...

When we were studying these blogs (about a year ago), Arab language blogs were a minority in these two communities. A majority of the UAE bloggers were actually expats, many of whom were not Arabic speakers. Some of the Kuwaiti bloggers would write some posts in Arabic and others in English (on the same blog). A common practice for the Kuwaiti bloggers (and I suspect other Arab bloggers) is writing out Arabic phrases or words in English.

8:10 PM  
Noor said...

oh, and to answer your original question :) . . .

I'm not sure if there's been an increase in Arabic language blogging since our study.

8:16 PM  
Laura said...

thanks! would be interesting to study which language was used for which content in Kuwaiti blogs

8:41 AM  

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