In a first-of-its-kind study, UC Irvine researchers have provided new insight into blog readers’ online habits and experiences, as well as how they perceive their roles in blog-based communities.

The research, led by Eric Baumer, doctoral candidate at UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences; Mark Sueyoshi, international studies and East Asian cultures undergraduate student; and Bill Tomlinson, informatics professor, is the first to focus primarily on blog reading. Previous studies about weblogs, or blogs, typically have centered on blog writers, largely overlooking those who go online to read, comment and participate.

A better understanding of the reader-blogger connection could lead to new, advanced features that would enable richer interactions between the two groups. For readers, an installed add-on could enrich their experience by tracking blog habits of which they might not be aware. For bloggers, a logging tool could help them easily distinguish between different types of readers and allow them to better connect with audiences.

The UCI study examined in-depth the blog-reading habits of 15 participants of various ages to determine how they consume content and interact with blogs and blog writers. The research found that some readers frequently post comments, while in others “lurk,” or visit without commenting. Among the findings:

• Readers have diverse opinions of what makes a blog a blog. Academic definitions generally refer to blogs as frequently modified Web pages with dated entries listed in reverse chronological order. But study participants identified a wide variety of characteristics in what they considered to be blogs. These included both technical aspects like RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and trackback links, as well as social aspects, including the presence of conversation or personal content.

• Regular blog reading often becomes more habitual and less content oriented. Similar to e-mail checking, blog reading can become ingrained into users’ online routine. Sometimes, even the usefulness of the blog content itself can be less vital than the activity of reading or skimming the blog to fulfill a person’s particular routine.
• The timing of a blog post is not nearly as relevant to readers as its position among the other entries. Readers are more likely to read the most recent posts at the top of the screen, and are generally less concerned with the exact age of a post. A vast majority of participants said they were not bothered when they were not able to read each and every blog post, challenging a common theory that users tend to feel overwhelmed by the need to remain constantly up to date.
• Blog readers feel a responsibility to make insightful contributions. While past research noted readers expect bloggers to deliver frequent, high-quality posts, the UCI study found readers also place pressure on themselves to produce coherent, worthwhile comments in response to good blog posts.

“With the increased popularity of blogs, various tools like Blogger and Movable Type have made writing a blog easy for a wide audience,” said Baumer, who studies informatics — a discipline that focuses on the use of information technology in real-world settings. “But, until the technology embraces the role of the audience, the full social potential of blogging remains untapped.

“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.”

The researchers hope their work will prompt further studies about the roles of blog readers and how features such as commenting and linking create new ways to interact with authors and text.

This potential change in research approach would be similar to a shift that occurred in literary theory in the 1960s and 1970s, when scholars began taking into account readers’ responses when studying literature.

“This study is really just the beginning,” said Tomlinson, an ICS professor and affiliate of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. “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.”

[Jason Mednick @ University of California - Irvine]

Gnomie Intrepid writes:

Chris,

I did a search on your blog and noticed you haven’t blogged about this yet. I’ve been using a widget-creating Web app from Widgetbox.com to link to my blog on blogspot.com (to see my “blidget” in action, visit my MySpace page [the profile is NOT set to private], and to view the blog, go here). The site calls widgets for blogs “blidgets,” which is the app I will be describing here. There are other type of widgets you can create there, but I’m only using the “blidget.”

The “blidget,” in summary, allows you to post a widget on a site that lists the recently blogged posts on your blog in a wonderfully looking, easy to read widget. The widget has clickable links back to your blog, so this helps network your blog out to more readers. If they like your blog enough, they can click the “Get Widget” icon at the bottom of the “blidget,” and they can throw it up on other sites, or even their own, and they all link back to your blog.

The shining glory of this Web app is its convenience. The widget automatically knows when you post to your blog and updates the widget automatically, which makes the upkeep of the widget very minimal. If your blog is supported, and most major blogging sites like Blogspot, LiveJournal, and WordPress are, then you just fill your blog link in and start creating (I believe the code is RSS-based). Also, there are several great looking soft gradient colors to choose from, and options varying from showing titles only, or titles with a preview of the blog post. You can also throw a custom icon into the corner of the “blidget” instead of the few selections they have for you via direct URL link to the image. I haven’t made a symbol for my blog yet, so I’m using the default Blogspot “B” icon.

They also allow you to select from a variety of code types, including but not limited to making the “blidget” flash, and a special MySpace code to get around the problem with links in Flash on MySpace. When you click “Get Widget,” a window appears with the several different Web site-specific code types, and the HTML code. It is automatically copied to your clipboard so that it is only a matter of pasting the code where you would like the widget.

There are two incredibly useful tools you can use after you create your “blidget.” After you create a widget, click on the “My Widgetbox” tab from the homepage and then select your widget. Scroll down a little, and this is where you see the first bit of information in an easily readable format. They have a graph that shows how many hits your widget has and on what days the hits occurred. This helps to see how many people have been reading your blog and actually using your widget! The other nice tool they have is the pie chart that shows where people have been clicking on your “blidget.” This shows on what domains your “blidget” has been recieving the most traffic! This helps you see where most of your traffic is being directed from. To get to the pie chart, click on the “View more details” button to the bottom right of the graph.

As far as I know, there’s no limit to how many times you can hotlink the widget or a bandwidth limit, so you can toss it up on several sites without worry. Best of all, its free!

Enjoy your blidget!