What Are They Blogging About Personality Topic and Motivation in Blogs
Citation
Alastair J. Gill, Scott Nowson, Jon Oberlander. What Are They Blogging About? Personality, Topic and Motivation in Blogs, Proceedings of the Third International ICWSM Conference (2009).
Online version
Summary
This paper analyzed topic and motivation in weblogs written by different people. The authors first defined the hypothesis that different people write weblogs with different motivations, and the motivation in turn affects their topic. The authors further hypothesized the motivations for five different personalities: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness.
The author conducted their experiments on the weblogs from the Nielsen BuzzMetrics' blog data. They first used automatic tools to cleanup the data (removing HTML tags, etc.), then using the bag-of-words method and calculated the counts for each word categories: 1st Person, 2nd Person, 3rd Person, Positive Emotion, Negative Emotion, Cognitive Proc, Sensory Proc, Time, Past Verbs, Present Verbs, Future Verbs, Occupation, Leisure Activity, and Physical.
The author concluded that:
- Neurotic authors use blogs to serve a cathartic function, in which they mainly reflect upon themselves.
- Highly Extraverted authors use blogs to document their lives at a high level, and uniquely interact with the readers. They also vent both positive and negative emotions.
- Highly Opened authors write more about leisure activities, and they are more evaluative than analytic.
- High Conscientiousness authors tend to report daily life around them.
- High agreeableness authors tend to express more positive feelings than negative ones.
Discussion
The authors used the word occurrence counts in the bag-of-word model as independent variables, and feed into the regression models, where the personality traits serve as dependent variables. They reached their conclusion above through analyzing which of the word categories appear significantly higher or lower than average.
Related Papers
- Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Double Day: Garden City, New York.
- Heylighen, F., and Dewaele, J.-M. 2000. Variation in the contextuality of language: an empirical measure. Foundations of Science, 7, 293–340.
- Li, D. 2005. Why do you blog: A uses-and-gratifications inquiry into bloggers’ motivations. Unpublished Masters Thesis, Marquette University.
Study Plan
The Goffman book talked about the connection between the kinds of acts that people put on in their daily life and their personality traits in theory, which is an excellent source for background knowledge.
- The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. External Link
- Variation in the contextuality of language: an empirical measure. External Link
- Why do you blog: A uses-and-gratifications inquiry into bloggers’ motivations. External Link
