Blogs and the Economics of Reciprocal Attention

Abstract

Blogs differ from other media in that authors are usually not remunerated and inscribe themselves in communities of similarly minded individuals. Bloggers value reciprocal attention, interaction with other bloggers and information from reading other blogs; they value being read but also writing itself, irrespective of an audience. A novel dataset from a major blogging community, LiveJournal, is used to verify predictions from a model of social networking. Content production and blogging activity are found to be related to the size and degree of asymmetry of the relational networks in which bloggers are inscribed. JEL Classifications: D63, D85, H41, L17, L82, L86, Z13Keywords: Blog; Internet; Media; Community; Social Network; Reciprocity; LiveJournal; Web 2.0. This paper models the behavior of bloggers, a specific type of producers of media content on the Internet. Such content consists mainly of entries, or short articles, published in blogs. Blogs are websites which are either individually or collectively maintained and deal in a variety of topics, ranging from the most mundane to the political, scientific or cultural. Entries are usually rather short, frequent and arranged chronologically. Blogs feature many links with a number of other websites, and they are widely read by and engaged with by the Internet community. Bloggers spend considerable time interacting with their readers, mainly other bloggers. They also read the entries of other bloggers, with whom they establish relations maintained over long periods of time.Blogs differ from other media as their authors are usually not remunerated and inscribe themselves in communities of similarly minded bloggers. There is little hierarchy and no clear distinction between writers and readers, i.e. between producers and consumers of information. Blogging * The support of the ESRC is gratefully acknowledged. This paper was presented at the 2d FLOSS Workshop in Rennes, France, and in a seminar at the University of East Anglia. We are grateful to Peter Moffatt for useful discussions. Bloggers respond to a mix of different motivations; they value interaction with other bloggers and information from reading other blogs. They value being read but they also value writing itself, irrespective of an audience.The aim of this paper is to determine how a mix of agents with different motivations exchange reciprocal attention, and to measure the relative importance of different motivations in taking part in the newly emergent networks of 'blogs'. In doing so, the paper exploits a unique and novel dataset from the LiveJournal blogging community.This paper thus devotes its attention to the moral codes, motivations and interactions of online participants into blogging networks. For example, if bloggers care primarily about expressing themselves, then their activity will not depend on the number in their audience. If instead bloggers care primarily about building relations with their readers and those they read, then there will be a fine balance between how much attention a ...