Blogs and the Economics of Reciprocal Attention

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.