Blog Platform Research Articles

Science blogging: an exploratory study of motives, styles, and audience reactions

This paper presents results from three studies on science blogging, the use of blogs for science communication. A survey addresses the views and motives of science bloggers, a first content analysis examines material published in science blogging platforms, while a second content analysis looks at reader responses to controversial issues covered in science blogs. Bloggers determine to a considerable degree which communicative function their blog can realize and how accessible it will be to non-experts Frequently readers are interested in adding their views to a post, a form of involvement which is in turn welcomed by the majority of bloggers.

Patterns and Pedagogy: Exploring Student Blog Use in Higher Education

As social and collaborative technologies emerge, educators and scholars continue to explore and experiment with how these tools might impact pedagogy. For over a decade, educators experimented with the use of blogs in academic settings, a tool that allows for students and instructors to enter into a rich dialogue. With most technology tools, users often leave ‘digital footprints’ throughout the environment. These footprints, in combination with other sources of data, allow researchers to explore relationships between the tool itself and the different types of end users. This study examines two years of institutional blog data, combined with demographic data to help describe the users of a blog platform. Different clusters of users are uncovered, and various use cases are explored, illustrating how different instructors choose to leverage blogs in the flow of a course. Using analysis of variance (ANOVA) to compare different blogging groups, results show a strong correlation between entry-dominant bloggers and growth in Grade Point Average (GPA) over time. With the rise in popularity of learning analytics, the results of this study might influence future learning analytics tools and systems

The effect of social embeddedness on bloggers’ creativity

Purpose – Blogs provide opportunities for bloggers to create. This creativity can attract audiences and generate commercial success for blog service providers (BSPs). Thus to obtain competitive advantage, such providers should stimulate their bloggers to produce creative content. The purpose of this paper is to adopt social embeddedness and creativity theory to explore factors influencing blogger creativity. Design/methodology/approach – An online questionnaire and an online embeddedness system are used to collect data from 353 bloggers, including data on their motivation, integration ability, structural and relational embeddedness and creativity. Hierarchical regression is applied for statistical analysis. Findings – Analytical results show that structural embeddedness and relational embeddedness affect blogger creativity. Additionally motivation negatively moderates the relationship between structural embeddedness and creativity, and integration ability negatively moderates the relationship between relational embeddedness and creativity. Research limitations/implications – This study applies social embeddedness to elucidate the relationships among quantity and quality of professional knowledge and creativity. This study also discusses the moderating effect of motivation and integration ability on the relationship between social embeddedness and creativity. Practical implications – Creative articles by bloggers can popularise a blog platform, as they can retain bloggers and attract new bloggers. Therefore, for BSPs enhancing the creative performance of bloggers is one way to obtain competitive advantage. Originality/value – The study contributes to knowledge of social embeddedness and creativity on blog web sites, and importantly, this study develops a model that explains how antecedents influence blogger creativity.

Exploring the Cuban blogosphere: Discourse networks and informal politics

Despite the rapid growth of a blogosphere literature interested in blogging practices across democratic countries and authoritarian regimes, little is known about Cuban blogs. This study aims to bridge this gap by specifically looking at 66 blogs from four ideologically diverging Cuban blog platforms. By applying a combination of social network analysis and content analysis techniques, the study investigates structure and content of the Cuban blogosphere. Findings show that blog interactions have developed differently depending on the blogs’ ideological orientation although cross-ideologictsal interactions have sometimes emerged. The Cuban blogosphere has extended beyond national borders primarily via diaspora blogs, centering its discourse network on domestic political issues divergent from those available on state- or US-controlled mainstream media.

How we created a targeted teaching tool using blog architecture for anesthesia and critical care education – The A/e anesthesia exchange blog

Background: The time constraints on a clinical educator have increased immensely over the past decade. Technology has served to significantly bridge the challenge over the past decade.What we did: We created a method of delivering targeted educational content for point of care learning in anesthesia and critical care. Our blog platform allows clinician-educators to deliver content as videopodcasts and presentations to learners in a straightforward and easily accessible manner both on the web and through mobile platforms. The A/e Anesthesia exchange “pushed” content at predetermined time intervals to learners and content was based on timely topics that were clinically relevant to their daily practice. The A/e Blog allowed multiple authors across disciplines to contribute content, thus providing learners potentially access to resources of knowledge from the entire team of clinician-educators at an institution. During the pilot phase of A/e blog implementation, the authors gained valuable insights into the use and limitations of web-based technology as a teaching tool. These included challenges with faculty and student participation, managing techno stress of faculty not fluent with the technology, tailoring content based on analytics data and web platform robustness and spam protection.Conclusion: With these insights in hand, we anticipate the launch of an even more robust A/e: Anesthesia Exchange (version 2.0) by the end of 2013.

Organizational blogging: a case study of a corporate weblog from an employee perspective

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to address and discuss usage and implications of a weblog in a corporate communication context from an employees' perspective. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a case study of a government agency's corporate blogging activity, traced through focus group interviews with the organizational bloggers and analyzed using situational analysis and thematic network analysis. Findings – The study problematizes the predominant focus on the promises of interactivity and dialogue as a repeated positive motivation for corporate bloggers by shedding a light on blogging as experienced from inside an organization. The study shows that employee bloggers use the blog platform in a varied way and do not agree internally on the appropriate corporate blog usage. Four main positions that encapsulate the variation in blog usage – the official, the debater, the engineer and the passionate blogger – are identified, and the implications (opportunities and barriers) of blogging for the blogging employees' behavior and motivation are unfolded and discussed. Practical implications – The findings are useful for managers to get insight into the challenges, barriers and opportunities, which employees experience when acting as bloggers on behalf of an organization, as well as when acting on other transparent Web 2.0 mediated communications platforms for corporate purposes. The findings also indicate and give recommendations to the internal resources required to support the employees when letting them out into the blogosphere. Originality/value – The paper provides a documented, nuanced and deep insight and understanding into blog usage in a corporate context from the perspective of the employee bloggers. This insight is as critical to our understanding of blogging and social media in a corporate context, as it is to our understanding of transparent and participatory organizational culture.

Research of the blog platform-assisted collaborative learning model in the teaching of 'micro-controller principles and applications'

‘Micro-controller principles and applications’ is a significantly important course to be taken by an optoelectronic information science and engineering major. The course is both comprehensive and practical. The main aim of the course is to enhance students’ learning initiative and their ability to apply a micro-controller. This article discusses the new methodology found in the curriculum’s design, implementation and evaluation. The new teaching method employs a collaborative learning model assisted by a blog platform, which is not only conducive to strengthening the teacher’s leading role and promoting the ability of students to self-teach, but this method also encourages and develops the students’ spirit of teamwork and improves their overall ability to learn.

From freshman to sophomore

Editorial December 17th, 2012 marks the day when a casual conversation with my associates about the persistent lack of biomedical research culture and the disinterest shown by the civil authorities throughout South Asia encouraged us to lay the foundation of El Mednifico Journal (EMJ) [1]. From the very beginning, EMJ was founded as a journal that would eventually provide biomedical and allied professionals and undergraduates from different institutes a healthy platform to utilize their potentials for research conduction and presentation, with special emphasis on recent advancements and discoveries made throughout the field of medicine. An attached blogging platform named Blogemia was also launched in order to inculcate a sense of research in biomedical students by promoting healthy writing practices that would eventually benefit them in their professional life.

Science Communication: Self-Publishing's Benefits

The News story “The seer of science publishing” (T. Rabesandratana, special section on Communication in Science, 4 October, p. [66][1]) draws attention to F1000Research , a journal offering immediate publication with post-publication peer review and revision. The idea of post-publication review is not new. Fifteen years ago I launched naturalSCIENCE ( ), which offered free online publication of original research with post-publication comment. However, scientists were reluctant to contribute and publicly comment. If thinking has changed, I see little necessity for publishers or publication fees. All that is required is a science-friendly blog platform that handles scientific notation and math, edits tables, and forces standardized formatting of references. Volunteered peer reviews could be handled with standard blog comment machinery; reviewers could be required to establish their bona fides by making their identities and scientific resumes publicly available. If revised, earlier drafts could remain available for the benefit of those interested in following the development of the paper. However, most scientists currently still depend for advancement on publishing in high-impact journals that, whatever one may think of citations analysis, undoubtedly attract the majority of the better papers and do a great deal more than most low-impact journals to add value through reviewing, fact checking, copyediting, graphics editing, table editing, and rewriting. If it emerges at all, science self-publishing seems unlikely to have great impact on top journals but will divert content from the proliferating multitude of low-impact journals. Such a development could have many benefits, such as a reduction in cost of science communication; a leak-proof channel for the immediate announcement of breakthrough results; a convenient means for the dissemination of negative results; the opportunity for novice scientists to receive a wider range of advice and criticism than they could expect from the perfunctory review process used by marginal commercial journals; and a means for reviewers to receive recognition for ideas or information disclosed in the course of a review. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.342.6154.66

A rumor spreading model with variable forgetting rate

A rumor spreading model with the consideration of forgetting rate changing over time is examined in small-world networks. The mean-field equations are derived to describe the dynamics of rumor spreading in small-world networks. Further, numerical solutions are conducted on LiveJournal, an online social blogging platform, to better understand the performance of the model. Results show that the forgetting rate has a significant impact on the final size of rumor spreading: the larger the initial forgetting rate or the faster the forgetting speed, the smaller the final size of the rumor spreading. Numerical solutions also show that the final size of rumor spreading is much larger under a variable forgetting rate compared to that under a constant forgetting rate.

Using a Teaching Blog Platform as a Collaborative Network for After Class Learning of Accounting Affair Vocational Certificate Test

Using a Teaching Blog Platform as a Collaborative Network for After Class Learning of Accounting Affair Vocational Certificate Test

Sustaining teacher control in a blog-based personal learning environment

<p>Various tools and services based on Web 2.0 (mainly blogs, wikis, social networking tools) are increasingly used in formal education to create personal learning environments, providing self-directed learners with more freedom, choice, and control over their learning. In such distributed and personalized learning environments, the traditional role of the teacher is being transformed into that of a facilitator. This change inevitably means a reduced level of control on the part of the teacher. This is evidenced, for example, in difficulties experienced in retaining the necessary levels of control when the learning process moves away from institutionally maintained systems to blog-based personal learning environments. In conducting a course in a formal education setting however, it is still essential for the teacher to retain control over certain learning activities, such as course enrolment, assignments, and the assessment process.</p><p>A course management plug-in for the WordPress blog platform called <em>LePress</em> was designed and developed as a possible solution to this problem. By using LePress, teachers are able to more easily manage and coordinate courses in a distributed blog-based environment. Teachers are able to regain control over some important aspects of online course management, while maintaining the learners’ freedom and choice for self-directed learning. This paper documents the results of a survey of a group of 37 teachers who used LePress for at least six months. The study demonstrates that by using LePress, teachers experienced an enhanced level of control over several aspects of the course and this reinforced their perception about the ease of use of the system.</p>

Law Professor Blogs Network 2.0: Faculty, IT, and Vendor Collaboration

The Law Professor Blogs Network is the nation's only network of legal blogs edited primarily by law professors. The network owns and operates forty legal blogs, edited by leading scholars and educators who are committed to providing the web destination for law professors, practitioners, government and nonprofit lawyers, legal information professionals, and students in their respective fields. Since the launch of TaxProf Blog on April 15, 2004, the network’s influence has continued to grow with roughly ten million annual page views in recent years. After nine years of operation, the network is undertaking a major re-design to provide the premier legal blogging platform to our editors. The re-design will (1) optimize each blog for viewing across a variety of platforms (desktop, laptop, tablet, and smart phone); (2) better integrate social media; (3) provide more robust analytics with richer and more accurate readership data; and (4) strengthen our partnership with Wolters Kluwer/Aspen Publishers and provide additional avenues for monetization.

Addressing the policy challenges and opportunities of “Big data”

Addressing the policy challenges and opportunities of “Big data”

Mapping the public agenda with topic modeling: The case of the Russian livejournal

AbstractThis article describes agendas as “packages” of topics of varying salience, set by the Russian Internet users on Russia's leading blog platform LiveJournal. The research involved modeling LiveJournal's topic structure, viewed as an important component of what is termed here self‐generated public opinion. Topic modeling was performed automatically with the LDA algorithm, and complemented with hand labeling of topics. Data were collected by software created by the authors to generate a relational database storing all posts by the top 2,000 LiveJournal users from three one‐month periods: two during the Russian parliamentary and presidential elections 2011–2012, and one control period. We find that LiveJournal top users share their attention evenly between “social/political” and “private/recreational” issues, the proportion being very stable. However, the substitution of diverse public affairs issues by the topics related to national street protests in the politicized periods compared to the control period was found both automatically and manually. The group of topics centered around social issues demonstrates the biggest volatility in terms of its composition and may serve as the foundation for monitoring self‐generated public opinion by further application of sentiment/opinion mining methods to these topics.

Online Medical Professionalism: Patient and Public Relationships: Policy Statement From the American College of Physicians and the Federation of State Medical Boards

User-created content and communications on Web-based applications, such as networking sites, media sharing sites, or blog platforms, have dramatically increased in popularity over the past several years, but there has been little policy or guidance on the best practices to inform standards for the professional conduct of physicians in the digital environment. Areas of specific concern include the use of such media for nonclinical purposes, implications for confidentiality, the use of social media in patient education, and how all of this affects the public's trust in physicians as patient-physician interactions extend into the digital environment. Opportunities afforded by online applications represent a new frontier in medicine as physicians and patients become more connected. This position paper from the American College of Physicians and the Federation of State Medical Boards examines and provides recommendations about the influence of social media on the patient-physician relationship, the role of these media in public perception of physician behaviors, and strategies for physician-physician communication that preserve confidentiality while best using these technologies.

A call for increased public engagement in geology higher education

Rising fees are forcing higher education institutions to think critically about what students are offered for their money. In geology courses there appears to be a lack of guidance for alternative careers in academia or industry, and even a lack of education about wider social, political and economic impacts of the discipline. It is possible to detect a lack of high-impact geoscience among the popular science communication communities, such as online multidisciplinary blogging platforms. In order to enhance the student experience and the impact of geoscience on the wider public, universities need to look inwards at what they can do to help inspire and educate students to have broader career horizons and bigger public impacts through their research.

Privacy preserving release of blogosphere data in the presence of search engines

Users registered in a blogging platform and the subscriptions among them compose a social network with non-symmetric relations, whose data can be modeled as a directed graph. Release of such data for scientific analysis requires a pre-processing for ensuring no private information about people will be disclosed. The measures to be taken depend on the previous structural information a dishonest analyst is assumed to have. In this paper, the considered previous information is the sorting of blogs according to their PageRank relevance, which can be obtained by querying the blogging platform search engine. After analyzing the scenario, the n-rank confusion model is proposed. Experimental results show this model achieves a high privacy protection level while preserving the structural parameters of directed graph data to a high extent.

Predictive Analysis on Electoral Poll using micro- blogging (twitter)

The advent of blogging more and more content is published on the web. Micro blogging is used to convey ideas using short text messages; video links or images .micro blogging platforms allow the public to convey their ideas through new technologies and to convey ideas and news in precise manner. This paper aims to use to text mining algorithm, which is used for gathering relevant information from passages of text, to derive a context through which predictive analysis can be made. The goal will be to use this technique to provide a predictive analysis on the electoral polls using tweets from the micro-blogging platform twitter.

Research blogging: indexing and registering the change in science 2.0.

Increasing public interest in science information in a digital and 2.0 science era promotes a dramatically, rapid and deep change in science itself. The emergence and expansion of new technologies and internet-based tools is leading to new means to improve scientific methodology and communication, assessment, promotion and certification. It allows methods of acquisition, manipulation and storage, generating vast quantities of data that can further facilitate the research process. It also improves access to scientific results through information sharing and discussion. Content previously restricted only to specialists is now available to a wider audience. This context requires new management systems to make scientific knowledge more accessible and useable, including new measures to evaluate the reach of scientific information. The new science and research quality measures are strongly related to the new online technologies and services based in social media. Tools such as blogs, social bookmarks and online reference managers, Twitter and others offer alternative, transparent and more comprehensive information about the active interest, usage and reach of scientific publications. Another of these new filters is the Research Blogging platform, which was created in 2007 and now has over 1,230 active blogs, with over 26,960 entries posted about peer-reviewed research on subjects ranging from Anthropology to Zoology. This study takes a closer look at RB, in order to get insights into its contribution to the rapidly changing landscape of scientific communication.