Alexia Gaudeul , Laurence Mathieu and Chiara Peroni (University of East Anglia – School of Economics , University of East Anglia – Centre for Competition Policy and University of East Anglia) have posted Blogs and the Economics of Reciprocal Attention on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Blogs differ from other media in that authors are usually not remunerated and inscribe themselves in communities of similarly minded individuals. Bloggers value reciprocal attention, interaction with other bloggers and information from reading other blogs; they value being read but also writing itself, irrespective of an audience. A novel dataset from a major blogging community, Livejournal, is used to verify predictions from a model of social networking. Content production and blogging activity are found to be related to the size and degree of asymmetry of the relational networks in which bloggers are inscribed.
From the paper:
- "Hypothesis 1 Bloggers who display higher levels of content production and general blogging
activity have a higher number of readers (H1)."- "Hypothesis 2 Bloggers with less friends than readers (who are read by more bloggers
than they read blogs) produce more content than others. Bloggers with more friends than
readers (who read more blogs than other bloggers read them) have less content than others
(H2)."
ROFL, but also definitely recommended to those interested in network economics or blogging!