Bamblog

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I’ve come across an article by Carolyn Wei called "Formation of Norms in a Blog Community" which appears in the Collection "Into the Blogosphere". It triggered a couple of ideas, since I’m thinking a lot about comceptualizing the emergence of rules/norms within Weblogs and social software.

Carolyn conducted a weblog-centered analysis of 33 Members of the "Knitting Bloggers"-Webring and basically checked wether the membership guidelines of the Webring were followed, and if not, to what extent they were bent or modified. There was some variation: the norm "English posts" was always followed as well as the norm "publish the code for the webring icon" was followed. Not all of the members seemed to follow the norm to post regularly (and published when they felt like), and not all of the posts were about knitting, so most blogs were not mono- but polythematic in content. In addition to those norms explicitly stated in the guidelines, Wei identified some emerging practices, for example installing additional features (progress bar for knitting works, customized buttons, ..) or keeping separate "knitting blogroll".

An interesting article, but I think two crucial points are missing (not from the article as such, but for a wider and more thorough analysis):

- Contrary to the title, there is no explicit discussion of the formation of norms as such - we learn that there are explicit and emergent norms, but how exactly the latter come into being remains unclear. I guess it would be worthwhile to transfer findings from the emergence of norms within email communities to weblogs - Postmes/Spears/Lea (2000) have done a good study on this, showing the existence and formation of group-specific practices and rules within a group of 200+ people. In addition, we need a model for the formation of rules (and relations as the second type of structures) that takes both the individual agent and the community/network context into account.

- There is no discussion of different types of norms/rules. I see two important dimensions to distinguish different types [not yet sure about the naming]:
1. Scope of Norms: Rules in Weblogs can be about Publishing (what to publish, how often, when to comment (if at all), …) or Networking (how to link to other posts, blogs, content)
2. Base of Norms: Rules can be either explicitly stated (as in guidelines or usage agreements), emerging from ongoing interaction or part of the architecture/code of the underlying application.

In these terms, Wei deals with explicit norms of publishing (english, regularly, on knitting) and Networking (adding the webring code) as well as with emergent rules of publishing (additional features, polythematic) and networking (specific knitting-blogroll). The "architectural dimension" is missing, although it is important - Weblog-CMS and hosting platforms differ in their features and sophistication which might in turn have an influence on publishing or networking rules.

So there’s still some conceptual work to do…