Formation of Norms in a Blog Community

Abstract

Blogs are often situated within a blog community of similar interests.These communities can be a useful way for readers to access a specific slice of the estimated one million blogs published in 2003 (Technorati.com,as cited in Lindahl & Blount, 2003).Online blog communities can form around numerous themes such as blogs from Dallas/Forth Worth, Texas, blogs about Java programming, or blogs by redheads.Each of these blog communities has its own practices and behaviors, some of which are shaped by explicit community guidelines.The Redhead Blogs community, for instance, specifies types of redheads allowed in the community and warns against offensive content (Redhead Blogs, 2004).Overt guidelines may shape some of these standards; however, the formation of norms within blog communities may also be influenced by the content or values of member sites.Because blog posts are often spontaneous and informally written, norms within a blog community may be formed "bottom-up" from actual practice.This paper reports on a study of a community of blogs devoted to knitting and compares the community's stated normative guidelines with actual practice.Although explicit rules may help to shape a fledgling blog community, the behaviors of individual bloggers may also help to create norms.Further, actual practice may also elaborate on stated guidelines in unexpected ways.The purpose of the study is to identify common themes, behaviors, and practices with respect to content and site design within this community of knitting bloggers and to examine the formation of these norms, particularly in relation to the community's stated rules.This paper reports the results of the content analysis of a selection of posts from a sample of members of the web ring.Some specific norms of the web ring are discussed, and potential explanations for their formation are discussed.Online communities have sprung up around other media such as newsgroups, digital games, or chat rooms and have developed their own norms, unique to the medium and the culture of each group.For example, the fans of the band Phish developed social and behavioral norms on the Phish.netUsenet group that revealed shared values, which are also reflected in the list's FAQ (Watson, 1997).Distinctive behavioral norms have also emerged in environments as diverse as a Usenet group for soap opera fans (Baym, 1998), a lesbian caf in a MOO (Correll, 1995), a roleplaying MUD (Schaap, 2002) and the WELL, an electronic messaging system for topical discussion (Rheingold, 1994).Blog communities may also develop practices and norms informed by the blog format.The blog format allows for highly individualistic expression.For example, Rebecca Blood, a veteran blogger and writer about blogging, noted that the introduction of Blogger, a popular tool that made it easy to write freely about anything, probably influenced the growth of "short-form journal" blogs filled with quick thoughts on the writer's daily life (Blood, 2000).Further, in her Weblog Handbook, Blood identified conventions, genres, standards, and etiquette that are often observed in blogs, but notes that "[e]ach weblogger creates a personal version of the weblog format, dictated by purpose, interest, and whim" (Blood, 2002, p. 8).These individualistic blogs will often join in communities of similar views or interests linked to each other in their sidebar navigation menus (Blood, 2002).Empirical research has also identified common practices among blogs in general.Halavais (2002) found that blogs randomly sampled from blog directories such as weblogs.comand livejournal.commost commonly discuss top news stories.Herring et al. (2004) analyzed a random sample of blogs from blo.gs and described many aspects of blogs such as author characteristics, purpose of the blog, structural elements, and temporal features.