A Study of Bloggers' Information Gathering and Sharing Behavior
Date Issued
2007
Date
2007
Author(s)
Ke, Li-hsiu
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
Blog is an internet medium which contains articles, images, films, and music. Since blog possesses a lot of advantages in terms of operation, its users have formed a huge community on the Internet recently. Besides, field of Library and Information Science paid little attention to the interaction of information between individuals when they studied human information behaviors in the past. Therefore, study of bloggers’ information gathering and sharing behavior is needed. This study aims at: 1. Exploring bloggers’ information gathering behavior which contains bloggers’ approaches to accessing and choosing blogs and expectations of using blog information. 2. Exploring bloggers’ information sharing incentive and behavior. 3. Finding out if there are changes between bloggers’ information gathering and sharing behavior from early periods to the present. 4. Delving into bloggers’ level of acceptance to the information gathering and sharing tools on their blogs.
Intensive interview was conducted to investigate bloggers’ information gathering and sharing behavior. The research targets are fifteen bloggers who were selected from winners of Global Chinese Blog Contest. The interview comprises four parts: the interviewee’s background, his/her information gathering behavior, his/her information sharing behavior, and his/her acceptance to the information gathering and sharing tools on the blog.
The conclusions acquired in this study are summarized as follows. The first part relates to bloggers’ information gathering behavior. 1. Browsing is bloggers’ favorite way to access blogs, but they will also adopt tracking or keyword retrieving to access blogs according to their needs. 2. Interest, relationship, uniqueness of the content, and popularity are the main factors that influence bloggers’ choice. 3. Network expanding, knowledge-gaining, and problem-solving are the main functions of blog information to the bloggers. 4. Bloggers will turn to blogs when they need immediate, diverse, and subjective information.
The second part relates to bloggers’ information sharing behavior. 1. All bloggers have experiences in sharing, and writing blogs would help them to do more sharing activities. 2. Bloggers’ sharing incentives are changeable. Mutually beneficial relations, group needs, and self expressions are the most common sharing incentives. 3. Bloggers acquire information through various ways. 4. Bloggers choose shared information according to distinctions among topics and personal experiences. 5. Bloggers selectively express themselves. 6. Bloggers have the same behavioral patterns and characteristics in presenting information. 7. Bloggers take information sharing behavior as part of their life, even extending information sharing behavior to other plans. 8. Bloggers take a positive attitude toward information sharing activities.
The third part relates to bloggers’ information gathering and sharing behavior between earlier stage and present stage. 1. Experiences are more helpful to facilitate bloggers’ information gathering behavior. 2. Bloggers’ sharing intension doesn’t correspond with their sharing behavior. Besides, this study also finds out that bloggers choose information gathering and sharing tools depending on the necessity and suitability of tools. Furthermore, the difference in bloggers’ information sharing behavior is more obvious than the difference in bloggers’ information gathering behavior. A model of bloggers’ information gathering and sharing behavior has also been built up in this study.
According to the above conclusions, suggestions are proposed to the beginners of blog, the bloggers who desire to run their blog diversely, and blog service providers respectively. The following suggestions are made for future research: 1. To investigate the information gathering and sharing behavior by different groups or under different conditions. 2. To combine diverse research methods to gather research data. 3. To investigate the role of information gathering and sharing behavior in information behavior theory. 4. To figure out the relations between various related concepts of information behavior.
Subjects
部落格
部落客
blog
blogger
information gathering
information sharing
information use
information behavior
Type
thesis
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