New study suggest blog post quantity trumps quality for online popularity
Still believe all that hogwash about quality over quantity? According to a study presented at the British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference last Wednesday, bloggers who post frequently are much more “attractive” than infrequent posters, regardless of post quality.
This via the BPS Web site:
The researchers looked at a number of factors including: the number of blog posts each participant had made, the total word count of their blog posts, the tone of their posts – whether they contained negative or positive words – and the number of friends they had. Each member of the online community was asked to rate their impressions of each other member on a scale of one to five (one being very unattractive and five very attractive) after one week.
They discovered that the popularity of participants could be accounted for by their activity within the community, but not by the tone of their posts. “The more words a person had contributed, the more attractive they were rated by the other members of their community. The strongest factor was found to be the total number of words they had contributed over the week,” said Susan Jamison-Powell (the person who conducted the study as part of her PhD thesis).
Of course there are several problems with such an experiment. There is no objective way to judge quality or “tone” so those frequent posters may very well have been higher-quality posters as well. Other problems with this study include:
- A very small sample data set (75 bloggers)
- An intrinsically different blogging environment from that of the majority of bloggers. LiveJournal is probably the most unique blogging platform and is set apart from platforms like Google Blogger and WordPress because of its community aspects.
The study may not close the door on the whole quantity vs. quality blogging debate but it sure is food for thought. I have personally asked Susan Jamison-Powell to share her data and address my concerns. Should she return my email, I will post her data (with her permission) and response.
Highly relevant post I wrote last month: Frequent blog posting or consistent blog posting?
Update – 4/20/10
Susan Jamison-Powell was kind enough to answer both of my concerns and point me to a PDF of the poster presented at the BPS. The raw data will soon be published, ostensibly in a print publication, so I can’t publish them here.
Here are Susan’s responses to both of my points above:
You are completely correct in your assertion in your blog that the architecture of Livejournal is different to standard blogging sites. The emphasis on my study was of social media and social network aspect rather than the blogging aspect of LJ. I chose LJ as this was a site where individuals could interact in an in depth manner (as opposed to something like Facebook, where the interactions tend to be short and sweet as opposed to deep and meaningful). The sample size may seem quite small (and indeed it would be very small if it was simply a case of examining a community posting and asking people to judge the members on attractiveness), but this was a closed community created for the purposes of the study. It was also longitudinal, which is a methodology that is notoriously hard to recruit. I spoke to a couple of cyberpsychologists during last week’s conference who were amazed that I got that many people to take part and at the degree of activity within the community (over the 12 weeks of the study there were 292 posts and 6691 comments made). I’m really grateful to my participants for showing this level of engagement in the study, particularly as I left it up to them to define the community and have very little input into the community posts.
You are also correct about the problems with the tone measure. I tried hand coding the data with some members of my research team, however this stuff is so subjective, using a subjective method of measurement resulted in very poor interrater reliability. The linguistic content analysis is not great by any means, but it is the best I could find (and has been used in other studies which examine online disclosure). I have since looked at employing the use of first person personal pronouns as a predictor of affect (such as emotional closeness and trust) and found that this does seem to have some relationship with affect when combined with emotional tone (although this data is very preliminary so am hesitant to comment on this too much).
For further reading on Susan’s study, check out post on her blog Always Altiloquent.
Tags: blogging psychology, blogging studies, content
I think I am going to start posting frequently !