research-article

Blogging at work and the corporate attention economy

Authors:

Scott A. Golder,

Michael J. BrzozowskiAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '09: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 2071 - 2080

https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1519016

Published: 04 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

The attention economy motivates participation in peer-produced sites on the Web like YouTube and Wikipedia. However, this economy appears to break down at work. We studied a large internal corporate blogging community using log files and interviews and found that employees expected to receive attention when they contributed to blogs, but these expectations often went unmet. Like in the external blogosphere, a few people received most of the attention, and many people received little or none. Employees expressed frustration if they invested time and received little or no perceived return on investment. While many corporations are looking to adopt Web-based communication tools like blogs, wikis, and forums, these efforts will fail unless employees are motivated to participate and contribute content. We identify where the attention economy breaks down in a corporate blog community and suggest mechanisms for improvement.

References

[1]

Agarwal, N., Liu, H., Tang, L. and Yu, P.S., Identifying the influential bloggers in a community. In Proc. ICWSM '08, ACM, (2008).

Digital Library

[2]

Baumer, E., Sueyoshi, M. and Tomlinson, B., Exploring the role of the reader in the activity of blogging. In Proc. CHI '08, ACM Press, (2008), 1111--1120.

Digital Library

[3]

Bugzilla@Mozilla. Bugzilla Etiquette.

[4]

Chin, A. and Chignell, M., A social hypertext model for finding community in blogs. In Proceedings of the seventeenth conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, ACM, (2006).

Digital Library

[5]

Davenport, T.H. and Beck, J.C. The Attention economy. Ubiquity, 2 (14). 1.

Digital Library

[6]

Efimova, L. and Grudin, J., Crossing Boundaries: A Case Study of Employee Blogging. In Proc. HICSS '07, IEEE Computer Society, (2007).

Digital Library

[7]

Goldhaber, M.H. The Attention Economy and the Net. First Monday, 2 (4).

[8]

Goldhaber, M.H. The value of openness in an attention economy. First Monday, 11 (6).

[9]

Gruhl, D., Guha, R., Liben-Nowell, D. and Tomkins, A., Information diffusion through blogspace. In Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, ACM, (2004).

Digital Library

[10]

Gurzick, D. and Lutters, W.G., From the personal to the profound: understanding the blog life cycle. In CHI '06 extended abstracts ACM, (2006).

Digital Library

[11]

Herring, S.C., Scheidt, L.A., Bonus, S. and Wright, E., Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs. In Proc. HICSS '04, IEEE Computer Society, (2004).

Digital Library

[12]

Huberman, B.A., Romero, D. and Wu, F. Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity. arXiv:0809.3030v1.

[13]

Huh, J., Jones, L., Erickson, T., Kellogg, W.A., Bellamy, R.K.E. and Thomas, J.C., BlogCentral: the role of internal blogs at work. In CHI '07 extended abstracts, ACM, (2007).

Digital Library

[14]

Jackson, A., Yates, J. and Orlikowski, W., Corporate Blogging: Building community through persistent digital talk. In Proc. HICSS '07, IEEE Computer Society, (2007).

Digital Library

[15]

Jonathan, G. Groupware and social dynamics: eight challenges for developers. Commun. ACM, 37 (1). 92--105.

Digital Library

[16]

Kolari, P., Finin, T., Yesha, Y., Yesha, Y., Lyons, K., Perelgut, S. and Hawkins, J., On the Structure, Properties and Utility of Internal Corporate Blogs. In Proc. ICWSM '07, (2007).

[17]

Kollock, P. The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace. in Smith, M.a.K., P. ed. Communities in Cyberspace, Routledge, New York, 1999, 220--239.

Digital Library

[18]

Kramer, A. and Rodden, K., Word usage and posting behaviors: modeling blogs with unobtrusive data collection methods. In Proc. CHI '08, ACM, (2008).

Digital Library

[19]

Krishnamurthy, B., Gill, P. and Arlitt, M., A few chirps about Twitter. In ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Online Social Networks, ACM, (2008).

Digital Library

[20]

Maslow, A.H. A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, 50. 370--396.

[21]

Nardi, B.A., Schiano, D.J., Gumbrecht, M. and Swartz, L. Why we blog. Commun. ACM, 47 (12). 41--46.

Digital Library

[22]

Nardi, B.A., Whittaker, S. and Bradner, E., Interaction and outeraction: instant messaging in action. In Proc. CSCW '00, ACM, (2000).

Digital Library

[23]

Qamra, A., Tseng, B. and Chang, E.Y., Mining blog stories using community-based and temporal clustering. In Proc. CIKM '06, ACM, (2006).

Digital Library

[24]

Recuero, R.d.C., Information flows and social capital in weblogs: a case study in the Brazilian blogosphere. In Proc. Hypertext '08, ACM, (2008).

Digital Library

[25]

Simon, H.A. Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World. Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, The Johns Hopkins Press.

[26]

Simon, H.A. Organizations and Markets. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5 (2). 28.

[27]

Smith, A. New numbers for blogging and blog readership Pew Internet Posts, 2008.

[28]

Sunder, S., Kraut, R.E., Morris, J.H., Telang, R., Filer, D. and Cronin, M.A. Markets for Attention: Will Postage for Email Help?, Yale ICF Working Paper No. 02-28., 2002.

[29]

Tapscott, D. Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1998.

Digital Library

[30]

Tyler, J.R. and Tang, J.C., When can i expect an email response? a study of rhythms in email usage. In Proc. ECSCW '03, Kluwer Academic Publishers, (2003).

Digital Library

[31]

Voida, A., Voida, S., Greenberg, S. and He, H.A., Asymmetry in media spaces. In Proc. CSCW '08, ACM, (2008).

Digital Library

[32]

Wu, F. and Huberman, B.A. Novelty and collective attention. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 104 (45). 17599--17601.

[33]

Yardi, S., Golder, S. and Brzozowski, M., The Pulse of the Corporate Blogosphere. In CSCW 2008 Poster, (2008).

Cited By

Goree SAppleby GCrandall DSu N(2024)Attention is All They Need: Exploring the Media Archaeology of the Computer Vision Research PaperProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869558:CSCW2(1-25)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686955
Lu BGuo XLuo NWang XChen G(2022)Intra-Organizational Social Media and Employee Idea Generation: Analysis based on the Spanning-Relevance FrameworkJournal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering10.1007/s11518-022-5546-431:6(649-676)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-022-5546-4
Elega AÖzad BOloyede FOmisore OAbu Arqoub O(2020)Has Blog Reader–Focused Research Evolved?Sage Open10.1177/215824402096878610:4Online publication date: 9-Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244020968786
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Blogging at work and the corporate attention economy
1. Human-centered computing
2. Information systems
  1. Information systems applications

Recommendations

Bloggers and Readers Blogging Together: Collaborative Co-creation of Political Blogs

A significant amount of research has focused on blogs, bloggers, and blogging. However, relatively little work has examined blog readers, their interactions with bloggers, or their impact on blogging. This paper presents a qualitative study focusing ...
Exploring the role of the reader in the activity of blogging
CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Within the last decade, blogs have become an important element of popular culture, mass media, and the daily lives of countless Internet users. Despite the medium's interactive nature, most research on blogs focuses on either the blog itself or the ...
Blogging: self presentation and privacy
Privacy and the public/private divide

Blogs are permeating most niches of social life, and addressing a wide range of topics from scholarly and political issues1 to family and children's daily lives. By their very nature, blogs raise a number of privacy issues as they are easy to produce ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '09: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2009

2426 pages

ISBN:9781605582467

DOI:10.1145/1518701

General Chairs:
Dan R. Olsen
Brigham Young University
,
Richard B. Arthur
Brigham Young University
,
Program Chairs:
Ken Hinckley
Microsoft Research
,
Meredith Ringel Morris
Microsoft Research
,
Scott Hudson
Carnegie Mellon University
,
Saul Greenberg
University of Calgary

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 April 2009

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CHI '09

Sponsor:

CHI '09: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 4 - 9, 2009

MA, Boston, USA

Acceptance Rates

CHI '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,130 submissions, 25%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

CHI 2025

Sponsor:
sigchi

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 26 - May 1, 2025

Yokohama , Japan

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

58
Total Citations
View Citations
1,992
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)46
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3

Reflects downloads up to 27 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Goree SAppleby GCrandall DSu N(2024)Attention is All They Need: Exploring the Media Archaeology of the Computer Vision Research PaperProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869558:CSCW2(1-25)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686955
Lu BGuo XLuo NWang XChen G(2022)Intra-Organizational Social Media and Employee Idea Generation: Analysis based on the Spanning-Relevance FrameworkJournal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering10.1007/s11518-022-5546-431:6(649-676)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-022-5546-4
Elega AÖzad BOloyede FOmisore OAbu Arqoub O(2020)Has Blog Reader–Focused Research Evolved?Sage Open10.1177/215824402096878610:4Online publication date: 9-Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244020968786
Albu OEtter M(2020)How Social Media Mashups Enable and Constrain Online Activism of Civil Society OrganizationsHandbook of Communication for Development and Social Change10.1007/978-981-15-2014-3_80(891-909)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2014-3_80
Firfiray SGomez-Mejia L(2020)In Pursuit of Socioemotional Wealth: The Affordances of Social Media in Family FirmsUnderstanding Social Media and Entrepreneurship10.1007/978-3-030-43453-3_10(193-216)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43453-3_10
Lu YPan T(2019)The Effect of Employee Participation in Enterprise Social Media on Their Job PerformanceIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29429987(137528-137542)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2942998
Jarrahi MEshraghi A(2019)Digital natives vs digital immigrantsJournal of Enterprise Information Management10.1108/JEIM-04-2018-007132:6(1051-1070)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2019
https://doi.org/10.1108/JEIM-04-2018-0071
De Michele RFabbri TCanali CFurini MMirri SBouchard KGuidi B(2018)Social Technologies for the WorkplaceProceedings of the 4th EAI International Conference on Smart Objects and Technologies for Social Good10.1145/3284869.3284882(112-117)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3284869.3284882
Albu OEtter M(2018)How Social Media Mashups Enable and Constrain Online Activism of Civil Society OrganizationsHandbook of Communication for Development and Social Change10.1007/978-981-10-7035-8_80-1(1-19)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7035-8_80-1
Sharma HPillai S(2017)Social media technology management in College of Technology in OmanJournal of International Education in Business10.1108/JIEB-09-2016-002910:2(147-163)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2017
https://doi.org/10.1108/JIEB-09-2016-0029
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten