Oracle bloggers are storytellers, Microsoft bloggers are technocrats (III)

I think it’s about time that I finished up my little stylometric analysis of Oracle’s and Microsoft’s blog hubs that I started last month (part I, part II). While what I conducted was really just a quick glimpse at how certain linguistic features are distributed in both blogs, I think it still gave an impression of the differences in “blog culture” between the two companies.

Let’s look at the key observations again:

1. MSDN produces more posts per day than OraBlogs

This is hardly surprising, as there are likely to be more individual bloggers in Microsoft’s hub than in Oracle’s.

2. Individual posts in MSDN are on average twice as long as they are in OraBlogs

In conjunction with this, sentences in MSDN are generally shorter than they are in OraBlogs. There may be interference from non-English sources or from non-native English speakers here which could skew the numbers for MSDN somewhat.

3. Use of the first-person pronoun is marked in OraBlogs, while it is unmarked in MSDN

The use of I in OraBlogs is en par with the overall distribution in the blogs I’m tracking, whereas it is below average in MSDN. If we conclude some level of personal involvement from this, it suggests that MSDN bloggers are less involved than most bloggers.

4. Use of modals to express possibility/futurity is marked in MSDN, while past-tense markers rank lower-than-average

That is, future events and possibility appear to be referenced more frequently in MSDN, whereas past events play a larger role in OraBlogs.

5. When contrasting the two sources posts from OraBlogs tend to be more verbal, while posts from MSDN tend to be more nominal

Overall MSDN exhibits a high noun frequency, while OraBlogs has a comparatively low one. This fits quite well with the findings noted earlier.

So what does all of this mean? Well, the headline already gave the verdict away. However it’s a good idea to differentiate a bit more.

Oracle bloggers seem to relate things they are (or were) personally involved in more often than MSDN contributors. The latter seem to focus on present and future events and play a smaller role in their own writing, i.e. what they write relates less immediately to themselves than is the case with the orabloggers. Oracle’s bloggers also produce shorter posts, something that makes sense if you think about how “resource-intesive” writing a technical text usually is, compared to relating what you did on the weekend.

So there you have it: Microsoft is all business while Oracle has a knack for telling stories – at least in terms of how people at the two companies blog. Are these differences in style the result of different corporate cultures? Is it pure coincidence that there is a different in how they define blogging? Or am I just overlooking something?

Let me know what you think.