Approaches Adopted By Users To Evaluate Blogs: Case Study of Banaras Hindu University

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This paper examines the criteria and indicators that blog users consider important for evaluating the quality of blogs, and develops a user-centered framework for evaluating quality by conducting user surveys and post-survey email interviews. The personal characteristics that affect the users’ choices of criteria to evaluate the quality of blogs are examined as well. Keeping the objectives into consideration, to acquire users’ criteria for assessing the quality of blogs, the questionnaire was used as the instrument of the study. Descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis, an independent t-test, and a one-way ANOVA were employed to analyze data from the user survey. From an extensive literature review on the quality of information resources a list of common quality indicators was compiled. The collected quality criteria and indicators were transformed into hypothesized frameworks not tailored to any specific domain or demography. In order to gain better insight on the evaluation of blog quality and to identify the criteria that people consider crucial when evaluating the quality of blogs, online and face-to-face survey to rate the importance of indicators on a five point scale ranging from 1 (not important to all) to 5 (extremely important) was used. The sample included Banaras Hindu University faculty and staff members. The study's findings include 1) the criteria that users consider important when evaluating the quality of blogs are content quality, usability, authority, and blog credibility; 2) the indicators that blog users consider most important for evaluating the quality of blogs are understandability, accuracy, believability, currency, ease of use, and navigation; and 3) gender, education level, age, profession, purpose of use, and specific interests affect the user's choices of criteria for evaluating the quality of blogs.