What Are They Blogging About Personality Topic and Motivation in Blogs
Contents
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.
Discussion
- Different group's interest
The "golden parachute" practice is more popular in the management layers because it directly protects their interest by giving them direct compensation in the form of cash. Therefore the high level managers are the proponent to this practice, and were urging the shareholders to adopt such practice. However, this method is not seen as legitimate from the shareholder's point of view, because if it allows the possibility that the management team can work with the takeover initiator so that when the takeover is imminent, the shareholders have no way of fighting back.
On the other hand, the "poison pill" practice is much more tailored to protect the shareholder's interest, because it gives them greater control over the company's stock by allowing them to buy at half of the price. Therefore the shareholders here are the proponent to the "poison pill" practice.
- Different group's characteristic of diffusing information
The difference between the upper management and the shareholder's interests means they will each be the proponent for one of the practices. The difference in their information diffusion characteristics then explains why the "poison pill" takes much less time to achieve its popularity than "golden parachute".
The authors suggested that in the 1980s, it's very common for the shareholders of large corporations to sit on the board of directors across multiple companies. Those companies may or may not lies in the geographic proximity. Therefore the board of directors mostly heard of their "best practice" - "poison pill" from the meetings of other corporations.
On the other hand, the upper managers mostly spread their news locally, when they are playing golf together, or talking to each other in the chamber of commerce, therefore the practice of "golden parachute" mostly spread locally.
Techniques used
The authors used spatial heterogeneity model as their starting point. Based on this model, they calculated the correlation coefficients between the decision of adopting one of the practices and the features about the company, including "inside ownership", "institution ownership", "concentrated ownership", "market value", "market-to-book ratio", "inside directors", and "no. of interlocks". Then they calculated the statistical significance of each feature.
Related Papers
- Rogers, Everett M. 1995. Diffusion of Innovations, 4th ed. New York: Free Press.
- Strang, David, and Nancy Brandon Tuma. 1993. "Spatial and Temporal Heterogeneity in Diffusion." American Journal of Sociology 99:614-39.
- Cochran, Philip L., and Steven L. Wartick. 1984. " 'Golden Parachutes': A Closer Look." California Management Review 26 (4): 11 1-25.
- Davis, Gerald F. 1991. "Agents without Principles? The Spread of the Poison Pill through the Intercorporate Network." Administrative Science Quarterly 36583-90.
Study Plan
The paper discussed pretty thoroughly the background of hostile takeovers in the 1980s, however if you are not familiar with the background, you may want to read the Cochran and Davis's paper on "golden parachute" and "poison pill" practices.
