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It’s not every day I read a story on blogging when flipping through health and science RSS feeds. The Science Blog and Science Daily have released articles discussing a study conducted at UC Irvine studying “blog readers’ online habits and experiences, as well as how they perceive their roles in blog-based communities.” Blogging and “citizen journalism” continues to be a growing phenomenon - even the federal government is taking a look at how it can better communicate using Web 2.0 style methods. Recognizing the growing phenomenon, apparently the scientific community is taking a hard look at social interaction and information consumption:

The UCI study examined in-depth the blog-reading habits of 15 participants of various ages to determine how they consume content and interact with blogs and blog writers. The research found that some readers frequently post comments, while in others “lurk,” or visit without commenting.

“With the increased popularity of blogs, various tools like Blogger and Movable Type have made writing a blog easy for a wide audience,” said Baumer, who studies informatics. “But, until the technology embraces the role of the audience, the full social potential of blogging remains untapped.

The researchers hope their work will prompt further studies about the roles of blog readers and how features such as commenting and linking create new ways to interact with authors and text.

This potential change in research approach would be similar to a shift that occurred in literary theory in the 1960s and 1970s, when scholars began taking into account readers’ responses when studying literature.

“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.”

It appears the target audience for this study is other scientists - bloggers already study and are intimately aware of how they interact with their readers; blog readers don’t care about the science behind their interaction, they just enjoy receiving RSS feeds and having the opportunity to offer feedback and participate in discussions. Perhaps among those in the social science community, the “blogging movement” represents the same sort of paradigm shift quantum mechanics wrought on the “hard science” community - there is no longer such a thing as an objective observer. Of course, atoms and quarks don’t participate in discussions about what it means to be a quark and how quarks are being denied a voice in the current elections, so there’s possibly even a more thunderous change on the horizon for social sciences - not only is there no such thing as an objective observer, but interpretations and feedback offered by the observed participants have to be factored into the study.

It’s interesting to see the blogging movement through the eyes of scientists. For example, their findings included:

• Some readers frequently post comments, while in others “lurk,” or visit without commenting.
• Readers have diverse opinions of what makes a blog a blog. Academic definitions generally refer to blogs as frequently modified Web pages with dated entries listed in reverse chronological order. But study participants identified a wide variety of characteristics in what they considered to be blogs. These included both technical aspects like RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and trackback links, as well as social aspects, including the presence of conversation or personal content.
• Regular blog reading often becomes more habitual and less content oriented. Similar to e-mail checking, blog reading can become ingrained into users’ online routine. Sometimes, even the usefulness of the blog content itself can be less vital than the activity of reading or skimming the blog to fulfill a person’s particular routine.
• The timing of a blog post is not nearly as relevant to readers as its position among the other entries. Readers are more likely to read the most recent posts at the top of the screen, and are generally less concerned with the exact age of a post. A vast majority of participants said they were not bothered when they were not able to read each and every blog post, challenging a common theory that users tend to feel overwhelmed by the need to remain constantly up to date.
• Blog readers feel a responsibility to make insightful contributions. While past research noted readers expect bloggers to deliver frequent, high-quality posts, the UCI study found readers also place pressure on themselves to produce coherent, worthwhile comments in response to good blog posts.

Sound familiar? If you read “blogs on blogging” like John Chow, this kind of information is frequently discussed. However, my guess is scientists in general don’t blog much, and their fascination and study of the semantic web is proof we are living through a major shift in social science.

If you’re interested in reading more about blogging or semantic web and informatics, here’s some good places to start:

• O’Reilly Radar
• ReadWriteWeb
• iLibrarian
• John Chow
• Dosh Dosh
• PureBlogging

With more people in the science and medicine community jumping on the semantic web bandwagon, it will be interesting to see studies like this one conducted on information consumption, social networking and how it changes our social behaviors.

Do you want your doctor blogging about your checkup? Take our poll and tell us how you feel. Do you, as a blog reader, consume more of your information online than other media? Do you simply go through a daily routine of checking RSS feeds, or do you actually read articles to stay up-to-date on current events and topics that interest you?

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