Student: Norman Makoto Su, UCI/ISR

Advisor: Gloria Mark, UCI/ISR

blogs, are changing the way that people interact over the Internet. Two particular kinds of blogs have become particularly popular- political and personal/hobby oriented blogs. Each of these types of blogs foster a community of readers and writers. In this paper, we investigate how the notion of community is expressed through these two blog genres. We examine the differences between community aspects in political and personal blogs. We focus on four dimensions that are associated with community: activism, reputation, social connectedness and identity. Our results, based on a multilingual worldwide blogging survey of 121 political and 593 personal/hobby bloggers from four continents show significant differences in community characteristics across these genres.

Bio:

Norman Su is a 2nd year PhD student in the Department of Informatics at UCI. Broadly, his interests include virtual communities, ubicomp and user interfaces. With his advisor, Dr. Gloria Mark, Norman is currently doing research on technologies such as blogs that foster