Thinking about blogs and lurkers: pertaining to MA thesis, some students of mine are writing: can you measure the success of a corporate weblog, based on the number of comments to it? If the weblog has regular readers, that by reading blog forms some form of stronger tie with the company, even though they never comment, then the weblog can some form of effect, can't it? But not much seems to have been written about blogs in particular and lurking, though there are some interesting thoughts on way to measure the community of a blog (including the lurkers), in Efimova's and Hendrick's article: "In search for a virtual settlement:
An exploration of weblog community
boundaries" . They refer to an interesting looking article by Nonnecke & Preece: "Silents participants: Getting to know Lurkers Better". An early version of that (??) can be found in the draft: "Why Lurkers Lurk" which is online. Michael McVey has some interesting numbers of the ration of active readers, active lurkers and passive lurkers towards the end of a little paper of his: "Developing Online Communities". Apparently Laurie Mcneill also discuss them briefly in the article "Teaching on Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the INternet", but cant access that. Apparently bloglurkers are referred to as "blurkers", the first "formal" definition at Big Pink Cookie in November 2004 (??).

Yeah, and thumbs up for Morten, who while I was on holiday, went ahead and programmed a Blog Matrix Generator (link goes to Danish intro) where you can plot info about your blog to see it's development mapped on the matrix I suggested (sorry, Morten, for not reacting before, but the comment you left notifying me about the initiative didnt appear before I got back from holiday, then there was job change etc!). Some Danish bloggers have tried to map their blogs with his tool, see f.i. Oschlag. Morten also tested old colleague Dalager. Fun and uber cool, I could never have come up with something like that myself :), but it seems to work well, though I guess one could work on the character of the input words.

I know it is impossible to have a matrix with two measures on one axis, but with Morten's generator it actually seems to work, sort of! Will think about it more, and get back, once I have some peace and quiet to think more about (still in a weird in between jobs place, with multiple deadlines).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:50