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Title: Bloggers who reciprocate readership have more readers
A study of LiveJournal, the blog host, illustrates how important it is for ablogger to read and link to other bloggers in order to gain popularity andreadership. Attention in the blogging economy is won by paying attention toothers. This paper explores how bloggers measure the terms of trade inthe “attention economy” and shows a stigma is attached to notreciprocating links and comments from fellow bloggers.Social networking on the Internet has become a major phenomenon in thelast ten years. The reasons people blog and establish relations online aremany; expression of true feelings and ideas with the protection of anonymity, opportunity to find friends, developing one’s interests,becoming more visible within a profession, belonging to a community of fellow bloggers (“friends”), etc. We concentrate on that last motivation.The paper exploits a data set collected from LiveJournal. This datasetincludes measures of 
activity
(comments posted, made, entries written,communities joined, length of activity), and also measures of 
popularity
(number of blogs read, number of readers).The paper links popularity with activity and shows that 1) Bloggers withmore friends are more active 2) Bloggers that have more readers than theyread themselves are more active 3) Bloggers dislike bloggers who havemore readers than friends, that is, those bloggers will have less friendsthan their activity would normally predict 4) Part of this “stigma” is due to apreference for bloggers who have balanced lists of friends and readers,that is, imbalances on either side (more friends than readers or conversely)affect a blogger’s number of readers.From this analysis, we conclude that reciprocity is a major driver in theactivity of bloggers. In the absence of money as a tool for trade, bloggerstrade attention and content in a fluid way. This means that bloggers do notnecessarily exchange one comment for one comment, one entry for oneentry, one friend for one friend. They are more flexible. For example, ablogger may read another even if that other blogger has many friendsalready and thus cannot devote much attention back, if this blogger hassufficiently compelling content. Conversely, a blogger may reciprocate thefriendship of another blogger with little content to offer, if that friendship is“significant”, i.e. if it comes from a blogger with few friends.The conclusions from this study are important, because they show that thedynamics of the vast majority of blogs are very different from the dynamics
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