I am hesitant (as is Nils, if I interpret his comments correctly) to assume that the f-score differences between English/German and Russian are really anything other than systemically conditioned. The difference in score is more likely to be a difference between the three languages than a difference between culturally unique blogging practices.

It is also notable that Nils’ f-score results are quite high – 68.6 for English-language corporate blogs compared to only 53.3 in Nowson et al’s original investigation of the f-measure in (non-corporate) blogs. My own scores are somewhere in between, though with a lot of variation. Whatever the cause, 68.6 is unusually high, outranking even some genres of academic writing according to Scott and the BNC.

Both this and the high scores for Russian point to the f-score’s limitations more than to any other result in my view. The measure reflects word class distributions and derives predictions on the qualities of texts (”formal” vs “contextual”) from them. But language is compositional, word classes are an indealization of a language’s lexico-grammar and “formal” in Heylighen and Dewaele’s definition does not mean “stiff” or “dry” – it means explicit and context-independant vs. implicit and context-dependent.

In other words, I’ve become quite careful with assigning too much argumentative force to the numbers as such. Nils’ observations on the other hand sound interesting and very plausible to my ears. Personally, I’ve been moving more into the qualitative direction lately when it comes to methodology, simply because measures like the f-score are so fickle. This paper on intercultural pragmatics that we discussed in my class on the linguistics of business communication last semester offers some very interesting observations on how cultural influences shape genres using examples.

Close reading, while tedious, can be superior to a corpus-linguistic approach sometimes. On the other hand, Nils’ gave me an idea for another context in which the f-score might prove to be a very useful tool. Thanks for that

The Corporate Blogging Bibliography (corporatebloggingbib.ynada.com)

Since I’m also active in the library and information sciences community, I thought a simple list would not suffice and decided to use the Zotz plugin for Zotero, which is part of MIT’s Citeline project, to build a ‘2.0-ish’ bibliography. Note that metadata is missing in a few places and DOIs/links are not included with all sources.

To make importing these works into your own collection even easier, I’ve also uploaded the whole thing in Zotero RDF, RIS (Endnote) and BibTex formats. It would have been cool to embed everything directly into the page, but I must admit that I was too lazy to figure out how precisely that works.

In case you’re looking for an excellent citation management tool – Zotero totally rocks. I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone working with academic literature.

We are currently conducting research into the topic of internal blogging within companies. As part of this study we are inviting company bloggers to complete a short questionnaire in the form of an online survey available at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=ZnU4C0g9B6oWQjeG5fGJog_3d_3d

The questions deal with some general questions about your blog, about your motivation to blog and the impact of your blog. All data collected will be anonymous, and in the written report of the research it will not be possible to identify the individuals who contributed to the study, nor their affiliations.

Should you be interested in the findings of the research once it is complete, there is a place on the survey to leave your email address to which a report will be sent. If you have any questions about the work, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Thank you for participating

Mareike is being advised by Hazel Hall who has published extensively on knowledge management in institutional environments. Given that enough people participate (and it looks promising, as Mareike told me via email) this should produce quite interesting data.

Efimova, L., & Grudin, J. (2007). Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging. Proceedings of the Fortieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press. [pdf]

Kelleher, T., and Miller, B. M. (2006). Organizational blogs and the human voice: Relational strategies and relational outcomes. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), article 1. [html]

The focus in both articles is on employee blogs, which I find to be perhaps the most interesting subtype of company blogs for several reasons. If you are thinking about implementing blogs internally, have a look (and consider this as well).

On a side note: I never realized that Lilia Efimova has a blog (though in retrospect it seems fairly absurd to have assumed she doesn’t) and that it’s full of fascinating research on blogging at Microsoft (seriously Heather, you could have let me know*). That, and I find the way she uses flickr to annotate visualizations quite neat. Hmm, something new for my repertoire and Google Reader…

* I’m kidding of course. I have heard that quite a few people work at Microsoft (and Microsoft Research). I just thought I should ping you, the Microsoft blogger, about the article on Microsoft blogging.

Blogging Success Study (Backbone Media/Northeastern U)
Interviews with 20 corporate bloggers (qualitative). November 2006.

State of Corporate Blogging Survey (Makovsky)
Telephone interviews with a random selection of FT1000 companies, asked for their assumptions about blogging. February 2006.

Corporate Weblogs – Deployment, Promotion, and Measurement (Jupiter Research)
Behind a paywall. June 2006.

Blogging in the Enterprise (Guidewire)
Quantitative study. This is the source of the statement that 89% of all companies plan to start a blog by 2007. October 2005.

Corporate Blogging: is it worth the hype? (Backbone Media)
Detailed quantitative survey. July 2005.

Others:
Corporate Blog Learnings (PorterNovelli)

Blog Marketing for Ecommerce Sites (Marketing Sherpa)

Blogs: The new magic formula for corporate communications? (Deutsche Bank)

An Update from the Digital World (Morgan Stanley)