Found this link to some research on multi-disiplinary collaboration.
Understand Digital Markets (pdf) This link to a page about a book titled "Distributed Work"
Dina there are still two papers by Benedict Dellaert that I can not find on the web anymore. Here is a page with liks to the two but it looks like the pdfs have been pulled down.
"Tourists' Valuation of other Tourists' Contributions to Travel Web Sites" and "Exploring Consumers' Willingness to Contribute to Internet Web Sites"
I'll try to get you the text somehow. Anyway The Tourist one is simple and shows a nice approach through using some survey data and a nice simple choice model to come up with a number that represents the value that a visitor of the travel web site places on the existence of other travels comments. I want to use that choice model to evaluate Bloggers contribution to blog sites.
The second paper is a bit more general and pulls in indicators of why consumers would be willing to contribute to web sites. Both these papers predate blogs so they think of consumer contributions as post to a company web site like EBay or Motley fool. However many of the findings make sense and could be reexamined with the blog example.
People are more likely to participate when the cost of gaining a reputation is cheap. The various affordances of a blog make this true for bloggers.
More experienced Internet users are more likely to contribute. Education and Income also are indicators of participation but we knew all that.
So lets explore something we don't know. In weblogs what part of the supply chain are we particapating? I think its the innovation and product development phase or early stage design where much of the cost of a project cost is baked into its lifetime. In the early stage product development user contributions in the form of suggestions have the most value so in this way what value do these suggestions have. Maybe its not as much value but some form of Utility function.
Back to Blogs for blogs to work these good things depend on our readers or consumers willingness to make contributions to the blog space. What form do these contributions take. In the smallest a page read is a consumer contributing their attention, spending their time on this read above all others out there that they could read. Why? Some readers as consumers may become willing to leave a comment as their contribution, send and email or make a call. What is the utility gain in their consumption experience?
Next we need to back up and take some of the wonderful work from Wendy Moe and others that have done great work at explaining various information seeking or shopping behaviors involved in surfing the web.
We start with two types of information seeking behavior, goal directed or stimulus driven emersion. Then various navigation patterns per session can be bucketed as to which phase of the information seeking process they fall into, Awareness, Consideration, Deliberation, and Decisioin.
Awareness may bring you to a blog or a post then upon scanning that page you form a consideration set of what items to consume. Next from that consideration set deliberation takes place which is a rapid calculation of possible utility benefits form each of the available options then decision and consumption.
The model might be to create a taxonomy of the choices for participation on a blog then represent choice as a summation of three parts, the consumers charateristics, the carateristics of the thing being consumed in this case maybe a blog post or a list of comments, and thirdly the charateristics of the exchange. How hard is it for the consumer to make their contribution what is the complexity, time, and reputation cost of participation.
With this approach and survey data I might be able to understand why I don't participate in trackback but why I use waypath and explain some of the utility that I find in the consumption experience.
Ok that's a sketch Does that look like fun to anyone?
2:48:27 PM
|