Blogger Motivations: Power Pull and Positive Feedback

Finally, here it is, the blog paper.

Abstract

In the spring of 2005 I spoke with college student bloggers about their motivations for starting and continuing their blog, a frequently modified web page. The content of these blogs ranged from personal to political to poetry, although the majority of those I interviewed kept personal journal blogs. There were several factors that motivated these college students to begin and continue the sometimes risky activity of blogging including: the power over the web site, the pull medium where their audience actively accesses content, and the generally positive feedback from unknown readers, particularly on personal subjects. I found many similarities between blogs and personal home pages with one important difference–people read them. This one factor, which results from the expectation of frequent updates, has resulted in the formation of read/write communities of varying size and influence.

Update 10/2/05: Uploaded a slightly revised version.

Full paper in PDF

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You’re currently reading “Blogger Motivations: Power Pull and Positive Feedback,” an entry in technology and the social, the blog of Ericka Menchen Trevino

Published:: 06.28.05

Tags: Research

Jon Garfunkel 06.28.05 / 10pm

Interesting paper. From your conclusion:

“It was likely the intent of those who designed blogging software to alleviate the technical drudgery of updating web content. The social aspects of blog use demanded more features that enabled conversation and community.”

Certainly you could analyze more about “those who designed blogging.”– Winer for example. Yes, it was part about alleviating the drudgery, but there were DB-based tools at the time. It certainly compressed the process of uploading content (since the DB-based tools were a pricier then). But also remember part of the reason Winer created blogs was for promotion. Hence the PR/marketing embrace of blogs.

Also I would advise distinguishing between communities of friends and communities of practice, the latter of which have more functional needs then simply reading/writing each other.

BTW, I suggested to Eszter at NWU that she contact you. Or visa-versa. You have similar research interests and are in the same city. Good luck! — Jon

Ericka 06.29.05 / 8am

Thanks for the thoughtful comment Jon. I see that I’ll need to flesh out the design intent part (or leave it out). The friends / professionals distinction didn’t come up with the college students I spoke to, but I can definitely see that with my own experience. Thanks also for the contact.

Jon Garfunkel 06.29.05 / 9pm

Well, it’s not exactly “professionals” but any people with a shared interest.
See this definition. — Jon

Mathemagenic 10.12.05 / 1pm

AOIR: my selection of papers

technology and the social » The New Year 01.01.06 / 5pm

[...] It’s been about a year since I moved to this spiffy wordpress blog from my humble beginnings over at blogger. I’ve learned a lot about blogging not just through the blogging study I did, but also the technicalities as well. By watching my stats - which I had never done much in the ten years or so I’ve had a web site - I learned something I should have known for a long time - don’t EVER change the address of things if you can possibly help it - you could loose traffic & screw up your rankings. Now, of course, my original web host from 1995 doesn’t exist and I wouldn’t want that address anyway, but changing from erickamenchen.net/wordpress to blog.erickamenchen.net was a mistake in terms of my Technorati ranking and probably Google pagerank & probably the move over from blogger had some consequences too. [...]

technology and the social

Blogger Motivations: Power Pull and Positive Feedback

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