Blogging & Social Media Issues (b)

Microblogs & Weblogs - Friends or Foes?

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Microblogs are becoming an overwhelmingly fashionable form of social media. Similar to blogs, users post content and share information via networks followed; Different from blogs, microblogs accommodate faster updates by confining post size and content format (text-and-picture only) within an easy mobile updating support system. These design differentiations and ease of use creates new means for users to accumulate, 'like', and 'share' information at one finger tap on the buttons.

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Network Structure Characterising

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Information dynamic in weblogs and microblogs is realised via social network interactions - which information is spread, influence is exerted, and social recognition is constructed. Microblogs' network structure impact the information through the friendship networks reciprocity of those 'following', being 'followed'. Blogs, less of a declared set of ‘following’ relationships, falls short of actual user  \interactions; yet, blogs are comprehensively more diverse in participation patterns (Lento 2006; Librn-Nowell 2005), network dynamics (Adamic & Glance 2005; Kumar 2004, 2006), and information diffusion (Gruhl 2004).

Posting Quantity & Speed

Weblogs are less consistent and a poor fit in the trend of user contribution distributions (i.e. number of posts per month). Microbloggers contribute more than webloggers with higher magnitudes of posting contribution and consumption. The ease of new content updates allows microbloggers generate succinct information, compared to long-winded, bombastic blogging contents.

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Navigation Patterns

Microblogs differ from blogs not only as a channel of self-expression and conversation, but also its capacity for reference and Web navigation - thanks to its  mentions (tagging another user via the @username convention) which links route to other users (Yang 2010, p. 352). Nevertheless, weblogs have more space for adding URL links which navigate to other posts. Implicatively, weblogs serve as an internal blog for content consumption and Microblogs an outward and mono-directional one (see Figure 3 & Table 2).

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References

Adamic, L. A., & Glance, N. 2005, The political blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. election: divided they blog, Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Link

discovery, Chicago, Illinois.

Gruhl, D., Guha, R., Liben-Nowell, D., & Tomkins, A. 2004, Information diffusion through blogspace, Proceedings of the 13th World Wide Web.

Kumar, R., Novak, J., Raghavan, P., & Tomkins, A. 2004, 'Structure and evolution of blogspace', Communications of the ACM, vol. 47, no. 12, pp. 35 - 39.

Kumar, R., Novak, J., & Tomkins, A. 2006, Structure and evolution of online social networks, SIGKDD.

Lento, T., Welser, H. T., Gu, L., & Smith, M. 2006, The Ties that Blog: Examining the Relationship Between Social Ties and Continued Participation in the Wallop

Weblogging System, Paper presented at the WWW Third Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem.

Liben-Nowell, D., Novak, J., Kumar, R., Raghavan, P., & Tomkins, A. 2005, 'Geographic Routing in Social Networks', Proceedings of the National Academy of

Sciences, vol. 103, no. 33, pp. 11623-11628.

Yang, J., & Counts, S. 2010, Comparing Information Diffusion Structure in Weblogs and Microblogs, Proceedings of the 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, In ICWSM.