USID ‘08: Blogging community
Soccer Blogging in Social Network Sites: A community for leisure activity forming a community of practice. Blogs provide a better understanding of the thoughts and inclinations of people from varied works of life sharing their experience in their own words.
Role: Student researcher.
Done at: Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences, University of California Irvine, CA.
Duration: 4 Weeks.
Tasks: Literature Review, Participant Observation, Content Analysis.
Paper: Das S., Dwivedi S.: Soccer Blogging in Social Network Sites: A community for leisure activity forming a community of practice.Published in USID 2008. (Download PDF)
Abstract
The research question being explored is how does a blog’s genre affect how bloggers experience a sense of community? I am particularly interested in comparing the results of this niche community of bloggers to the characteristics of the mainstream blogging community.
Author Keywords
Weblogs, Premier League (PL), globalization, leisure blogs, Community of interest, Community of Practice (CoP), Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP), soccer.
Screenshot: Soccer community on Orkut
Methodology: -
A case study on the activities of a particular community of soccer club followers is done [30], and participant observation was carried out with content analysis of the blogs. Most of the data was gathered by first person observation – me looking into the blogs as a member of the community. More specifically, I created an account and joined a community remained mostly peripheral, primarily reading the threads and rarely participating in the discussion to avoid forming a bias to the discussion.