Finished reading Audience, Structure and Authority in the Weblog Community by Cameron Marlow quite some time ago, only posting it now.
This article aims at studying the concept of authority among community of webloggers. The findings are based on hyperlinks collected by the Blogdex project. A social network analysis (Wellman 1997) is done to describe the social structure, and the two interesting measures of authority are suggested to be popularity measured by affiliation and influence measured by citation.
The social ties formed by the webloggers community are through means of blogrolls, permalinks, comments and trackbacks. Each mean represents a different type of social reference.
Main study focused on:
Blogroll implying social affiliation
Permalink implying thoughts passed from one individual to another
It is found that having a high blogroll degree rank (which indicates popularity) does not necessary translate into a high permalink degree rank (which indicates level of influence)
– a Singaporean teacher's storeroom 🖖