Citation - Su, N., Wang, Y., Mark, G., Aiyelokun, T., & Nakano, T. (2005). A Bosom Buddy Afar Brings a Distant Land Near: Are Bloggers a Global Community? Communities and Technologies 2005, 171-190.

Keyword -

• 背景/動機：研究不同於西方文化的東方博客/部落格社群，其科技實踐有何不同。
  Information communication technologies on the Internet such as Usenet, Internet relay chats and multi-user dungeons have been used to enable virtual communities. However, a new form of technology, the weblog, or “blog”, has quickly risen as a means for self-expression and sharing knowledge for people across geographic distance. Though studies have focused on blogs in Western countries, our study targets the global blogging community. Inspired by previous studies that show significant differences in technology practices across cultures, we conducted a survey to investigate the influence of regional culture on a blogging community.
• 假定：
• 問題: 社群更受到在地社會文化影響，或是更受到「通用」網路文化影響。
  We asked the research question of whether bloggers are more influenced by their local cultures with respect to their sense of community, or rather whether a “universal” Internet culture is a stronger influence of community feeling.
• 方法：based on a multilingual worldwide blogging survey of 1232 participants from four continents
• 資料：
• 發現：東西方差異不大。但日本部落客則有些不同。
  Our results, […] show that while smaller differences could be found between Eastern and Western cultures, overall the global blogging community is indeed dominated by an Internet culture that shows no profound differences across cultures. However, one significant exception was found in Japanese bloggers and their concealment of identity.

《送杜少府之任蜀州》作者：王勃 城闕輔三秦，風煙望五津。 與君離別意，同是宦遊人。 海內存知己，天涯若比鄰。 無為在岐路，兒女共沾巾。

Blog 與以往社群技術不同之處：

Blogs differ from most Internet communication technologies in two ways:
(1) Blogging is writer-centric.
(2) Blogs are link-heavy.

地理區域差異是否會影響社群特徵

Becker and Mark (1999) asked whether community characteristics of social binding and social coherence could develop across geographically disperse groups.

• Krishnamurthy (2002) follows the burst of blog activity after 9/11; he creates a taxonomy of blogs, splitting them into four quadrants with two axes: personal vs. topical and individual vs. community.
• Herring et al. (2004) describe a study of 203 blogs from blog.gs where most blog authors were found to be young adult males located in the U.S. who create personal style journals updated almost daily.
• Bar-Ilan (2004) An average of 0.65 links and 0.3 comments were found per post. Bar-Ilan’s more focused analysis of 15 “professional” topicoriented blogs discovered that the majority of posts describe or quoted embedded links that led to a variety of targets such as other blogs, news items and content sites.
• Schiano et al. (2004) have shown blogs to have a cornucopia of functions—from diaries of personal expression to travelogue progress reports.
• Nardi et al. (2004a) provides an activity theory analysis framework for understanding blogging.

we have chosen to focus on examining in blogs several dimensions of a community that according to Preece and Maloney-Krichmar (2003) are particularly relevant: (1)activism, (2)reputation, (3)social connectedness and (4)identity. We discuss these facets in the following sections.

* Activism: 行動性

• Reputation: 個人聲譽
• Social connectedness: 社會連結性
• Identity: 個人身份展現

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