This Study's on You

There’s been a new study on you blog readers out there. The academic definition of a blog is a modified web page with dated entries in reverse chronological order. However, a UC of Irvine study found that participants considered many more things that needed to be present in blogs, such as RSS feeds, trackback and the presence of conversation like leaving comments after entries or polls.

Blog readers also become more consistent in their reading rather than subject matter oriented. The blogs people read become part of a person’s daily or weekly habit, like reading the paper was or will become.

Apparently, the timing of a story is not as important as is the position it is among other entries. As long as the story is near the top, readers are for the most part less concerned with the date the story was posted. This goes against the theory that blog readers have a constant need to be up to date.

The best part is that readers feel pressure and a responsibility to make “insightful contributions.” This pressure on themselves is as equal to the expectation they have on the bloggers to post frequent, high-quality posts.

The study was fun to read about, but it should be taken with a grain of salt. Only 15 participants were used even though they were over various ages.

“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.”