Ethnic clustering in blogging communities. This report by Hat Nim Choi studied and compared the LiveJournal and Xanga weblog communities, both of which seem to predominantly attract teenagers. While I’m not 100% confident about the methodology, the first figure from the results section is quite striking.
A LiveJournal user picked at random is overwhelmingly likely to be white, while a random Xangan is much more likely to be Asian or Asian-American. The author offers an explanation for this difference towards the end of the report:
Xanga’s mostly Asian community could be due to how it is promoted. One of the reasons why Xanga has such a large community is because Xanga users tell their friends to create a Xanga site. They want more friends to read their web logs and get involved. Mehra, Kilduff, and Brass (1998) found that the relative rarity of a group in a social context tended to promote members’ use of that group as a basis for shared identity and social interaction. Since Asians are in the minority in the U.S., it would seem that they would interact more with other Asian-Americans and therefore spread the use of Xangas among Asian-Americans. This could be one reason why Xanga users are predominantly Asian.
Interestingly, the Mehra citation directly echoes the content of Clay’s earlier “Odd Associates with Odd” post.
Another interesting observation is embedded in this: teenager weblogs are often started by friends who already know one another and word of mouth is an important factor in growth in community sites such as LiveJournal. I’m not sure this is equally true of weblogging at large.[Corante: Social Software]
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