|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Interview with:
Cameron Marlow SM '01
Cameron Marlow SM '01, is a PhD student in the Media Lab's Electronic Publishing Group working on how new communication technologies, such as weblogs and instant messaging, affect social ties, information diffusion, and Internet data collection. Check out his Blogdex project and his own weblog, Overstated. Why have web logs or blogs become so popular? The recent insurgence of weblog adoption can be attributed to the new forms of interaction that it provides. A new weblog author who engages other webloggers will suddenly find themselves embedded in a new social network of people that share their interests. These individuals are a constant readership that motivates the author to keep writing — their new audience of friends. Speaking from personal experience I can say that I have encountered more interesting people from all over the world by producing my weblog. Other Internet media, such as email or instant messaging are private and tend to support relationships that already exist. Chat rooms are temporal and exist under a veil of anonymity that makes them feel artificial. When I start to read another person's weblog, it's just like getting to know someone in an informal context: the first few times you get a sense of what they are like, and the longer you know them the better you know their idiosyncrasies. It's a natural way of finding new friends. How are blogs influencing mass media and the non-blogging public? Many weblogs are intent on informing their audience of topics that interest them. For instance, as a fan of the band Stereolab, I felt obligated to tell them about the death of band member Mary Hansen when I discovered this fact from a friend. In this way, webloggers are pushing media to their readers, and the aggregate audience is a massive one. The sum of millions of authors browsing the Web every day is a powerful resource. If something small but important is discovered by one weblogger, this nugget will spread to a large number of weblogs and reach a very wide audience. Many journalists have realized the potential of emerging media within the weblog community. Webloggers are a great leading indicator of trends in the news simply by being part of a group that intends to keep each other informed. A number of big media stories have been broken by webloggers, and some of them even reported first hand with mass media relaying it to a wider audience. I don't believe that webloggers will be replacing mass media anytime soon, but rather that as a form of micromedia they have a mutually beneficial parasitic relationship with it. What type of "information epidemics" are you studying in your Electronic Publishing Group research? I became interested in the weblog phenomenon a couple of years ago when I realized that many were referencing each other and discussing the same topics. I created Blogdex (for "weblog index") as a way of measuring and reporting on the different stories that were emerging in the community. It has since become a popular tool for webloggers, giving them a sense of global awareness. The tool allows them to keep up to date with the biggest ideas and also connect them to other weblogs with which they weren't previously familiar. While the project started out as a marginal interest, it has since become my main research focus. As a community, this is the first time researchers have been able to track the spread of ideas through an informal social network in such a large proportion. I'm hoping to describe the process by which information spreads by epidemic proportions, namely the properties of the information itself and the social structure that enables it.
|
|
|
Copyright ©2003 Massachusetts
Institute of Technology