Call for Papers – Fourth FLOSS Workshop

The Fourth FLOSS Workshop will take place in Jena (Germany) on July 1 and 2, 2010. The theme of the workshop will be “Business models, social networks and collaborative knowledge development”.

The call for papers is available at http://floss2010.pbworks.com, and can be downloaded at http://floss2010.pbworks.com/f/Call+for+Papers.pdf.

Two special guests will give introductory lectures about their research in that domain: Jürgen Bitzer will present his research on “Returns to Open Source Software Engagement: An Empirical Test of the Signaling Hypothesis”, and Rebeca Méndez-Durón will present her paper “Returns from Social Capital in Open Source Software Networks”.

Information about Jena is available on the workshop’s website (links at the top). Jena is a very pleasant and very old university town in what used to be East Germany. It is very well linked by high-speed trains from Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich.

Read more

Bloggers who reciprocate readership have more readers

Image via Wikipedia

Press release for “Blogs and the economics of reciprocal attention“, presented at the 2009 Royal Economic Society conference at the University of Surrey on the 21st of April. 

Excerpt: “A study of LiveJournal, the blog host, illustrates how important it is for a blogger to read and link to other bloggers to gain popularity and readership. Paying attention to others is the way to win attention in the blogging economy. This paper explores how bloggers measure the terms of trade in the “attention economy” and shows a stigma is attached to not reciprocating links and comments from fellow bloggers.”

Read more

Related Articles

• 10 Ways to Build Your Blog Readership (searchenginepeople.com)
• 6 Blogging Mistakes You Might Not Have Considered (tjantunen.com)
• Combatting Blog Envy (deliberateink.com)

New version of “Blogs and the Economics of Reciprocal Attention”

This new version of “Blogs and the Economics of Reciprocal Attention” exploits a wider data set and clarifies the way exchange of reciprocal attention between bloggers occurs. We argue that paying attention to other bloggers wins attention to one’s blog. We derive properties of blogging networks from a model where bloggers trade attention and content. 

The predictions from the model are then checked against a novel dataset from LiveJournal, a major blogging community. As predicted, the activity of a blogger is found to be related to the size and level of reciprocity within that blogger’s network of relations. We also find that bloggers who do not adhere to reciprocity norms are sanctioned with a lower number of readers.

The paper is available at SSRN and RePEc.

Blogs and the Economics of Reciprocal Attention

We use a novel dataset from a major blogging community, Livejournal, to show that bloggers who have a large audience, and are read by more people than they read, are likely to produce more content and be more interactive than other bloggers. However, a stigma is attached to those bloggers who do not reciprocate links. 

Read more