Aug 4th, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Blogging Studies, Corporate Blogging, Knowledge Blogging, Lilia Efimova, Microsoft | 6 Comments
While there is the occasional market research study into the adoption of blogs in corporate contexts and people are even thinking about metrics for measuring their success, things are still fairly lacking when it comes to in-depth academic research into what effect blogs have both on organizations and on how they are perceived. But that’s slowly changing. I’ve picked up these two very interesting articles recently, describing the use and acceptance of corporate blogs:
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. 
Jul 3rd, 2007 | Blogging Legal Issues, Corporate Blogging, Microsoft | No Comments
Oh, I admit the title sounds a tad dramatic, but in effect what I’m blogging here concerns revealing internal information, so if you add a mental wink the title is fairly appropriate. The object of controversy (or at least, a lot of interest) is this blog post by an anonymous Microsoft employee (via Heather). In it, a Microsoft recruiter interviews someone who previously worked for Google and asks about his experiences there. While the interviewer chose to share the text with other Microsofties through internal channels, the (anonymous) blogger decided go a step further and publicly post it in Just Say No To Google, which is apparently a one-shot blog.
As several of the many commentators have noted, the blogger is critical (or even hostile) of Google in a way that isn’t really reflected by the interview. Even his assertion that Google is not transparent is hardly supported by the interview - instead it effectively says that Google may be more attractive to some people and Microsoft more attractive to others, depending on your priorities and lifestyle (Heather echoes this in the last paragraph of her very interesting and detailed commentary).
While it is tempting for companies to file this under “how blogging can reveal your trade secrets”, that would be inaccurate, because this isn’t really blogging in the strictest sense. The anonymous Microsoftie has used the one-shot blog as a platform to publish something that someone else has written, though this may not be immediately transparent to readers. He could have published it using a different tool, but the simplicity and anonymity of a hosted blog made it the natural choice. It is exceedingly likely that in the future many earth-shattering revelations (which the “insider” information about Google’s cafeteria is surely not) will be made via blogs in this way, since there is hardly an easier way to reveal something you want to see revealed while remaining anonymous.
Jun 28th, 2007 | Adobe, Corporate Blogging, IBM, Knowledge Blogging, Microsoft, ROI of Blogging, SAP, Style | No Comments
And now, after an exciting trip into the world of science blogging, we return to our regular scheduled program.
I’ve been meaning to write something on knowledge blogs (that I’ve previously referred to as expert or industry blogs) as one specific subgenre of corporate blogs for quite a while now. Several recent conversations on the subject have further increased my interest and yesterday I realized that I have been sitting on an exclusive interview with a knowledge blog expert for several months - something that I should absolutely share.
Knowledge blogs are written with the intention of providing insight and information into a topic a company blogger has substantial expertise in. They can be public-facing or have restricted access, but in both cases the target audience is usually a specialized one. A public-facing knowledge blog (or a limited-access blog that allows providing access to affiliates) can be written for customers who seek information and instruction, partners who collaborate in a project, experts at academic institutions, consultants etc. I imagine a typical intranet blog is likely to be more bidirectional than a public-facing one, meaning it is likely to be used for internal communication, partly replacing email, whereas a blog that is accessible to everyone (like the one I’ll present in a moment) is normally used for instruction, making the exchange between blogger and reader more unidirectional.
Software companies like Microsoft, IBM, Sun, SAP and Adobe use public-facing knowledge blogs on a large scale for the purposes mentioned above. The very technical nature of their products makes customer service a largely informational challenge and many of the customers are not end-users, but second-level developers who use specialized development tools to in turn create end-user products.
One extremely successful example of a knowledge blog from the IT sector (and obviously there are many) is If broken it is, fix it you should which is maintained by Tess Ferrandez. Tess is “an escalation engineer in PSS (product support services) at Microsoft, mostly dealing with ASP.NET but anything .NETish works” (from her about page). The application of terms such as “knowledge” and “expert” becomes natural when you take a look at what Tess writes about. To someone not educated in debugging ASP.net applications virtually every sentence in the blog will be completely opaque, but to Tess’ sizable international audience her troubleshooting tips are invaluable.
Independently of whether or not you have a grasp of the subject matter, it becomes apparent quite quickly when reading If broke it is that Tess has a knack for explaining highly complex problems in an accessible way. Another aspect that intrigues me is that she often frames problems in a tone that resembles storytelling - there’s an arc of suspense, from the initial situation (something doesn’t work) to the discovery of the root of the problem and its resolution. Notably this kind of framing is the direct inversion of how issues are presented in a classical knowledge base. Contextual data (e.g. what the engineer thinks or experiences while he is working on the problem) is omitted. There is no sequence of events; instead facts are presented outside of time. For example, compare this entry from Tess’ blog with the knowledge base article it cites. The knowledge base article has no identifiable author (there is no “I”, like there is in the blog) and the sequence of topics does not map to a sequence of events. By contrast, Tess’ debugging examples are narratives; they don’t contain an objectively-detached analysis of a piece of software but the subjective-experiential description of how she approaches, assesses and fixes a problem. We learn by example.
There’s a lot I could write about why I think this is a very promising approach and what it has to do with how we process information, but I’ll save that for another post.
Here are Tess’ answers to 10 questions I asked her via email. I plan to conduct more of these interviews and use them for my thesis, to accurately describe the practitioner’s perspective on corporate blogging.
Once more, I would like to thank Tess for allowing me to interview her.
E-mail interview with Tess Ferrandez
Cornelius: What (if anything) do you enjoy most about blogging?
Tess: I enjoy the instant feedback from people reading the blog, and I enjoy teaching and debugging so blogging is the perfect venue for me to teach debugging and make sure that people don’t have to run into issues that they could easily avoid if they knew about them.
Cornelius: Did someone else encourage you to blog or did you start out of you own accord?
Tess: I started on my own accord, we keep telling customers the same thing over and over in emails and I figured that a) I could avoid having to reinvent the wheel all the time b) other people that don’t call support could benefit from this knowledge and c) if it is documented somewhere people will trust it more since it is something that is already known and not something that was made up to fit the evidence from the dumps.
Cornelius: Do you publish in certain intervals or create a schedule for publication?
Tess: I don’t have a schedule, I blog when I have something that I think is interesting to write about and when I have time to blog. My blog posts are pretty sporadic, one blog post one month and 5 the next.
Cornelius: What prompts you to write a piece?
Tess: When I have had a case that was either extremely interesting or when I find that I see the same issue over and over.
Cornelius: How would you describe your goals when writing a piece?
Tess: My goals are that the posts should be interesting to as many people as possible, so I mostly blog about issues that will affect a lot of different developers. My goals are also that it should be easy to digest while at the same time contain enough detail to be useful, so I structure the content in a way that you can either read it all if you are interested in the details or just read the bottom line if you are just interested in the solution. The primary purpose of the posts are to show common issues and their solutions but also provide debugging tips so that people can resolve similar issues on their own.
Cornelius: Has your employer made any suggestions to you regarding topics that should be avoided (e.g. for legal reasons) or made any suggestions to you on what to blog about?
Tess: Not really, however I avoid four things:
1. Naming customers,
2. Naming 3rd party components
3. Providing information about items that are either confidential or that I know are prone to change to avoid confusion.
These are pretty much the same rules that apply to any communication we have with customers, they expect to be able to trust us so we should not leave out any information about them, and in terms of 3rd party products, if I haven’t tested them myself in a formal way I can’t really expect to be able to express a formal opinion about them.
Cornelius: What kind of reactions do you get from colleagues, clients etc. regarding your blog?
Tess: Only positive, a lot of my colleagues have started blogging after they saw my blog and how many readers I got, i.e. how many people benefit from it, and I have seen a trend of these blogs being very successful.
My blog gets about 100 000 web hits and 400 000 RSS hits a month, and if something I write even helps 1 % of those that would be a good return on investment.
I almost get emails on a weekly bases with positive comments from readers and customers which is extremely encouraging and prompts me to write even more.
Cornelius: Do you put a lot of care into formal aspects like spelling, grammar etc?
Tess: I try not to misspell too many wordsJ but I don’t fret about it too much, after all my blog is not about linguisticsJ
Cornelius: Oh, linguists get these things wrong all the time, don’t worry
The reason I ask is mainly because some people (Robert Scoble, for example) say that to them blogs are conversations, so that in contrast to expository writing where you check, revise and edit a lot it’s mostly about speed and efficiency.
Your posts are very informational and complex and thus you probably spend more time planning and editing than someone like Scoble, who posts 4 or 5 very short pieces per day.
Cornelius: Has your approach to blogging changed over time?
Tess: Yes and no, after writing a lot of posts I can tell which posts are going to get a lot of hits and which ones aren’t, and also what people tend to search for when they get to my blog, so I try to keep titles etc. relevant so that more people can reach it and see immediately if it is relevant or not.
Cornelius: Do personal experiences play a role in your blogging?
Tess: I am not sure how to answer that. My blog is about personal experiences with issues that I have worked but I am not sure if that is what you are looking for.
Cornelius: My bad, the questions wasn’t phrased very well. What I meant was: do you ever refer to things that aren’t strictly work-related, things that you would describe as personal? Obviously you don’t post pictures of your cat (though some tech people do) but do you ever use anecdotes or stories in your posts?
Tess: I would say no, I don’t post much about personal experiences, in fact I think the only personal post I have made so far was when I got blog tagged.
The main reason is because I don’t think that is what people reading my blog are interested in, but having said that I would use personal references if it adds to the story, i.e. if something in my personal life could act as an analogy to explain something complex.
I do add a lot of personal comments though to make the posts more readable because I don’t want them to be stale and dry, but on the other hand I would never tell stories about my family and friends in the blog because I want to keep it informational rather than “here is what i did today”.
Apr 20th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Ghostblogging, Microsoft | 2 Comments
Geert D, a trade marketing manager at Microsoft, has an interesting post about Marc Bresseel, another Microsofter who has recently launched a blog. Geert quotes Bresseel as saying about his blog:
It is not ghostwritten like most corporate blogs; it’s authentic and hand made.
I’m a little intrigued by this evaluation. Is it merely Bresseel’s impression that many corporate blogs are ghostwritten, or is there any concrete evidence that would support such a claim? Do we both interpret the term ghostwriting in the same way, or possibly with different connotations?
I have no doubt at all that many corporate blogs, especially those dedicated to marketing and PR as well as executive blogs, see significant editing before they are published. But editing is not the same as ghostwriting. Putting it radically, I think letting someone else write your blog as a CEO is no different than to have someone else give newspaper interviews under your name. There is no betting way to wreck your credibility if you’re found out, plus your ghostwriter could publish something you don’t agree with - at least that’s my take. Opinions?
Feb 9th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, IBM, Jonathan Schwartz, Microsoft, Robert Scoble, Style, Thesis, Visualization | 13 Comments
I’ve been playing around with this great little tool for several days now and thought I’d share some of the results with you.
But first, here’s a brief recap of what I’ve been doing before I start throwing statistics at you.
I am in the process of building a textual database (or corpus, as linguists call it) of corporate and enterprise web logs. The purpose of this corpus is to investigate corporate blogs as a text type. In the current phase of my research, I am especially interested in the following questions
- how do corporate blogs compare stylistically with non-corporate blogs, news texts and other types?
- is there a typical ‘corporate blogging style’ in terms of how people write?
- are there recognizable differences in style that correspond with differences in purpose or authorship (in other words, do CEOs, marketers, software developers, etc have distinct styles?)
- how much variation is there stylistically between different blogs, different bloggers in the same hub (e.g. MSDN) and between different posts by the same blogger?
- are there patterns of change in style over time?
You might wonder what such a description is good for (well, apart from furthering the pursuit of knowledge and all that). I think that, on the practical level, it will enable us to better understand what people are trying to achieve with blogs and how they do it. Ultimately blogging is about good writing. The trouble is, neither is ‘good’ easily defined, nor is it always the same to everyone on any occasion. Blogging styles are highly dynamic and situation-dependent and I think the most successful bloggers very consciously adapt different styles to address different people and issues.
Right, so what do I have so far?
One of the first measures I’ve implemented into my database is a relatively simple formula for calculating how formal/informational or (on the other end of the scale) involved/context-dependent a text is. This is done by adding the frequencies of certain types of words together and subtracting others, under the assumption that (for example) nouns are more numerous in texts which are primarily informational, while a high frequency of pronouns indicates involvement. The formula looks like this:
(see Heylighen and Dewaele 2002)
As you can guess, the results are potentially ambiguous - in other words, texts can have a very high or low score for a variety of reasons - and should be used with care. That being said, the measure produces some pretty interesting results.
This is a chart of f-scores from Robert Scoble’s blog
Each data point in the graph is the f-score for a single post, or the average for several posts made on a single day. As the graph shows, Scoble’s posts are fairly consistently in the 50s in August and September. They surge to over 100 in mid-October and make overall gains in November and December, though these gains aren’t really as significant as they might look at first. The more notable change is the high degree of variation in these months compared to the time span before that.
You might wonder which posts exactly get a high or low f-score. Here are the entries with the highest score, by date.
Comparing new TailRank/DiggTech/TechMeme to Google Reader, 16 October 2006 (f-score 102)
Grapes on a Plane, 29 October 2006 (f-score 97)
The highs and lows of CES, 15 January 2007 (f-score 93)
Photo “training”, 21 January 2007 (f-score 106)
If you have a look at those posts, you’ll probably notice that they aren’t really in any way more formal than Scoble’s other writing. The difference is that they tend to be more informational, i.e. have more and more condensed information crammed into to them than most entries. Lists and enumerations will immediately lead to a high score (because they usually translate into a high noun count) and for Scoble those entries which are written in a sort of telegraph style to convey information about a photowalk or CES thus have a high score. This doesn’t really demerit the f-score as a metric - it simply means that it’s context-sensitive. What’s important is that, with an overall mean score of 60, Scobelizer ranks on the extreme low end of the formal/informational vs involved/contextual scale. To Scoble, blogs really are conversations, not just metaphorically but in a quite literal stylistic way.
That’s the score for one source over time. Let’s compare a bunch of sources.
If you have trouble seeing anything on the chart, look for a little dropdown menu on the lower right hand side labeled dot size. Change it from ‘posts’ to ‘no selection’ and all the dots will be changed to have the same size, which should make the whole thing a lot easier to read.
The chart is a representation of scores for 137 different blogs, computed from data collected during the last five months. Each dot represents a single blog and its average f-score on the x axis. The position of a dot on the y axis indicates the standard deviation of values inside of that blog, i.e. the degree of internal variation
The vast majority of the sources I’ve used are corporate blogs - after all that’s what my research is about. But in addition I’ve also thrown in a few non-corporate sources, simply to be able to compare one type of blog with another one. Thus the list contains 17 personal blogs randomly found via blogger.com, 1 a-list professional blogger (Scoble), 1 political blog hub (huffingtonpost.com) and 3 non-blog sources, namely editorials from the New York Times, the Washington Post and the LA Times collected in the course of this week (see below for a full list of sources).
The first thing likely to catch you eyes are the outliers. On the far right hand side, there is one source simply tagged “Blog” (informative, I know) with a record f-score of 195 and and a standard deviation of 92. That’s Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect of Microsoft. Now, if you have a look at his blog you might find that the best description for his writing is not so much formal, but rather “technical” or maybe “information-oriented”. The reasons for the high scores are the many compound nouns (things like development ecosystem, application components, clipboard data formats, etc) coupled with the overall significant length of entries. Like the other outlier, Irving Wladawsky-Berger of IBM, Ozzie also produces very long posts. Ozzie’s longest has 1,700 words, while Wladawsky-Berger is a close second with 1,500. Length tends to coincide with somewhat higher f-scores, however, there are counter-examples. Heather Hamilton has one post with a whopping word count of over 2,000 and an f-score of only 105. Generally brief posts tend to coincide with lower scores, but, as the example shows, there are exceptions.
Overall it is important to consider a few things, especially in regards to the those sources with a high standard deviation and a high f-score:
- the deviation is often high simply because there aren’t many posts (for example, Ozzie only has 6 entries)
- several of the high-deviation blogs are hubs, i.e. they aggregate a number of individual blogs (e.g. MSDN and HuffPo)
But the cool part is that the remaining sources usually contain very conscious stylistic variation (Jonathan Schwarz is a prime example). I other words, they write differently to address different people and achieve different things and this - at least to some extent - stylistically visible. Compare that with the scores for the three newspaper editorials grouped together in the lower right area of the plot. They are surprisingly consistent if you consider that we’re looking at texts published in three different papers, written by an even larger number of journalists. Which just shows that the editorial is a pretty solidified type of text in terms of style, while the (corporate) blog isn’t - at least not yet.
Anyway, I’ll wrap it up for now and save the more in-depth look for another post.
Sources
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Washington Post Editorials
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/opinions/columnsandblogs/?nav%3Dleft⊂=new
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Feb 2nd, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Microsoft, Oracle, Style | 1 Comment
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.
Jan 19th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Microsoft, Oracle, Style | 4 Comments
Edit #1: As Justin Kestelyn points out, Orablogs.com is not Oracle’s official blog hub (blogs.oracle.com is).
Edit #2: Sadly some of the charts in this post are still missing due to problems with a recent Wordpress update. If I find the time I will write a follow-up on this with new charts.
Welcome to part two of this class: Blog Stylistics 101. Last week we looked at some statistics and word lists comparing the OraBlogs and MSDN blog hubs. Today, let’s turn to the specific differences between the two hubs. I’ll start by giving you the updated word list, since the one use in the previous entry is already a tad stale by now.
| OraBlogs1 the DT 88742 to TO 4815
3 a DT 4098
4 and CC 3528
5 I PP 3339
6 of IN 3212
7 in IN 2618
8 is VBZ 2172
9 It PP 2002
10 For IN 1837
11 you PP 1767
12 on IN 1563
13 this DT 1469
14 with IN 1106
15 Oracle NP 1080
16 that IN 1074
17 be VB 939
18 was VBD 932
19 at IN 823
20 my PP$ 803
21 are VBP 757
22 an DT 748
23 as IN 736
24 from IN 700
25 but CC 699 |
MSDN1 the DT 217912 to TO 11819
3 a DT 8811
4 and CC 8626
5 of IN 7701
6 in IN 6186
7 is VBZ 5687
8 I PP 4614
9 For IN 4610
10 you PP 4454
11 It PP 3864
12 this DT 3689
13 on IN 3317
14 with IN 2506
15 that IN 2411
16 are VBP 2394
17 be VB 2368
18 we PP 2334
19 as IN 1964
20 If IN 1926
21 can MD 1921
22 that WDT 1778
23 will MD 1682
24 from IN 1636
25 an DT 1563 |
First I’ve highlighted the pronouns I, WE, IT, YOU and the possessive determiner MY. The OraBloggers are a bit more egocentric (I #5) than the Microbloggers (I #9, WE #18), who appear to mention the team more frequently (Borg Collective, anyone?). Now, before you run amok with those numbers, there are of course a lot of possible factors and caveats there. You can avoid I and WE pronouns by using IT, or THERE-constructions, or by simply repeating the referenced noun phrase (maybe that’s the case with ORACLE at #15 – hard to say). Of course WE can refer to something other than the company; it can simply be an indicator that people tend to hang out in groups at Microsoft while Oracle devs are more solitary. WE can mean the royal company we as in we at Microsoft love our customers, or it can be just be any group of people the speaker includes himself in, as in Bob and I, we had sandwiches for lunch. Technically, the second scenario is actually more likely, but common sense tells us that occurrences of this “general WE” shouldn’t be more frequent in Microsoft’s blogs than they are in Oracle’s unless there is some difference in either their behavior or in the report thereof. But even when taking this and a number of other things into account, the difference seems at least worthy of closer investigation, especially the variation in first person personal pronouns, which is pretty clearly marked. The frequency of I is determined both by the author’s stylistic preference and by the subject matter. Generally, personal involvement of the author makes it very hard to omit the use of I (as, for example, referring to yourself in the third person is not really an viable strategy in English) but there are exceptions. For example, it it relatively impossible to report what you did last summer without using I, but it is quite possible to report how you conducted a scientific experiment with little or no use of that pronoun. In most media reportages there is no explicit voice that is linguistically detectable, even if the reporting journalist is clearly the individual who has experienced the events. Likewise, use or omission of I makes a big difference when expressing opinion or criticism. A presidential address typically contains no first-person reference to the speaker because the president is not offering his private opinion, but acting in his official function. Assuming, however, that none of this is really typical of blogs (which prefer to be quite involved, with lots of I-usage) the higher I-count in OraBlogs really signals more personal involvement compared with Microsoft. Or, you can interpret it as egocentrism at Oracle vs. team-orientedness at Microsoft. Tricky, isn’t it?
Next I’ve marked past tense BE (#18 in OraBlogs) and the modals CAN (#21 in MSDN) and WILL (#23 in MSDN). It is notable that the modals rank higher-than-average in MSDN but lower in OraBlogs (corpus averages are #33, #32). In other words, there is more past tense usage in Oracle’s blogs than in the corpus mean. Since that includes personal blogs and other types which tend to have a knack for storytelling, the tendency is actually a relatively strong one. MSDN, by contrast, is more about future events and possibility than storytelling.
So far so good – let’s look at word classes.
OraBlogs(left) , MSDN (right)
This chart probably needs a little explanation. Start with the leftmost column, where the first line starts with “CC”. That stands for “part of speech” and is used to label word classes such as noun, verb, adjective etc. The second column has the absolute frequency of that part of speech. So the adjective (JJ) count for OraBlogs is 10,428. That in turn means that adjectives make up 5.3% of all words in Oracle’s blogs. The graph in the column right of the percentage visualizes this accordingly, which is why it’s so long for the NN type. NN stands for common noun (things like man, dog, or cable connector all belong to this category) which is usually significantly represented as a class.
So where are the differences? One notable thing is the higher IN-frequency in OraBlogs (9.1%) compared with MSDN (8.1%). The IN tag is used for both prepositions (e.g. behind, on) and subordinating conjunctions (e.g. whether, despite), which makes it rather difficult to say what exactly is more frequent here. However, the higher IN-frequency in OraBlogs makes sense in context with the greater average sentence length – longer sentences demand either coordination (measured with the CC tag) or subordination. The other interesting thing is the frequency of NN (common nouns) and NP (proper nouns) because that’s where Microsoft’s bloggers score very high, much higher than Oracle who is actually below the corpus average. So what are all those nouns needed for? My assumption is they’re mostly for talking about inanimate subjects – stuff – because that would fit with the comparatively low pronoun (PP) count. The table is actually incomplete; the figures for verbs (which would appear further down the list, after TO) are missing but there isn’t a lot of observable variation there - except for a higher past-tense usage on the part of the Oracles.
Okay, enough to digest for one sitting. I’ll put the grand conclusion into the third part of this series. And yes, I’ll try to post that in less than a week from now. 
Jan 10th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Microsoft, Oracle, Style | 2 Comments
Well, at least that’s what my corporate blogging corpus tells me. I’ve been tracking both companies’ developer blog networks for quite a while now (here and here) and my little stylometrics daemon has found some peculiar differences. So now that the holidays and my trip to California are both in the past, let’s get right back into the trenches of language analysis. Here’s the data.
OraBlogs.com (Oracle)
Posts: 1,234
Tracked from/to: 7 Aug 2006 to 19 Dec 2006*
Words (types): 100,805
Words (tokens): 177,488
Ratio: 0.57**
MSDN Blogs (Microsoft)
Posts: 1,411
Tracked from/to: 14 Sep 2006 to 19 Dec 2006*
Words (types): 204,790
Words (tokens): 455,947
Ratio: 0.45**
(* = I’m still tracking both feeds, I simply selected this date as a cut-off point)
(** = Note that the ratio is not particularly useful unless certain normalizations are performed)
What these statistics tell us is that both blog networks have a comparable total number of posts (1,234 Oracle vs 1,411 Microsoft) and that I’ve been tracking them for roughly the same time (three months for Microsoft, four for Oracle). You can also see that MSDN has a higher daily output - the Microsofties appear to have produced more posts in less time. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are individually more productive though, since we don’t know how many different authors are in each network. If MSDN has twice the number of bloggers they’ll obviously have no trouble producing a greater number of posts per day than the guys and girls over at Orablogs.com. Also keep in mind that I might occasionally miss posts as I rely on their RSS feeds for syndication and entries can “scroll past me” on a busy day.
What is quite interesting, however, is the total number of words (tokens) for each hub. Oracle comes in with a word count of just over 177k, while Microsoft has a staggering 455k – more than 2.5x that number. We’re relatively safe to assume that MSDN is simply the bigger network, but there’s more to it than that. Let’s look at the sentence count and a few averages.
OraBlogs
Sentences (SC): 10,271
Average Word Length (AWL): 4.1
Average Sentence Length (ASL): 17.3
Average Words per Post (AWpP): 143.8
MSDN
Sentences (SC): 33,803
Average Word Length (AWL): 4.6
Average Sentence Length (ASL): 13.5
Average Words per Post (AWpP): 323.1
MSDN has longer words, quite a bit above the average length for all blogs that I’m indexing (that global word length average stands at 4.2). This could potentially be caused by a whole lot of things, but my prime suspect is something not really related to specifically to the language of blogs: URLs and non-English words. URLs (web addresses) can be very long and they give tools for language computing headaches because they look like words (a string with whitespace left and right). It is possible to extract them of course, but I haven’t implemented that yet. While in most larger collections this shouldn’t make too much of a difference, as the relative frequency of URLs is reasonably low, things could be different with MSDN. Another thing is interference from non-English sources – MSDN has quite a few people who write in Russian, Mandarin Chinese, etc, and because the tagger doesn’t recognize these as non-English sources, they are likely to be misinterpreted.
The differences in post and sentence length, however, are fairly unlikely to be error-induced. As it stands, MSDN bloggers write posts which are twice as long as those written by their colleagues from Oracle. The Oracle guys write longer sentences – slightly about the corpus mean (16.6 words per sentence). By comparison, MSDN’s 13.5 average sentences length seems relatively low. One of the lowest values I have in my corpus is 12.5 (from an American teenager’s blog), a high one is 42.9, from IBM’s Irving Wladawsky-Berger. Please don’t draw any quick conclusions from this though. I’m pretty sure that Ernest Hemingway could be in the single digits with most of his prose.
Shorter sentences seem to correlate with longer posts, something that isn’t really too surprising, but still interesting to see with live numbers. Normally you would factor in type-token ratio here to look at the lexical density, but I’m not ready to do that with vast differences is total word count (there is a technique to avoid such issues but I’ll spare you the details). Anyway, let’s move on to wordlists.
|
OraBlogs
1 the DT 8095
2 to TO 4354
3 a DT 3650
4 and CC 3175
5 I PP 2996
6 of IN 2889
7 in IN 2358
8 is VBZ 1961
9 It PP 1794
10 For IN 1665
11 you PP 1628
12 on IN 1392
13 this DT 1341
14 Oracle NP 992
15 with IN 978
16 that IN 966
17 be VB 855
18 was VBD 836
19 at IN 757
20 my PP$ 713
21 are VBP 693
22 an DT 660
23 as IN 649
24 from IN 649
25 but CC 631 |
MSDN
1 the DT 18155
2 to TO 10036
3 a DT 7408
4 and CC 7261
5 of IN 6406
6 in IN 5202
7 is VBZ 4642
8 For IN 3856
9 I PP 3836
10 you PP 3821
11 It PP 3171
12 this DT 3127
13 on IN 2810
14 with IN 2100
15 are VBP 1996
16 that IN 1996
17 be VB 1965
18 we PP 1861
19 can MD 1647
20 as IN 1634
21 If IN 1581
22 that WDT 1518
23 will MD 1407
24 an DT 1313
25 from IN 1281 |
I’ve highlighted a few things that look interesting to me. First of all, the general similarities are really not very surprising if you’ve seen this kind of thing before. Sometimes the news media comes up with sensationalist stories about the decline of our civilization, often with a pseudolinguistic angle a la “teenagers these days use only 100 different words in their speech”. Lists such as this one illustrate why it’s a ridiculous argument. In both speech and writing we do most of the work using the same handy components over and over again. The definite article THE in English is usually in the number one position when you’re dealing with written texts, and it is fairly often followed by TO, AND and OF though the exact sequence varies from one type of text to the next. While there is a marked difference in such distributions between written and spoken language (makes sense when you think about it), the picture is otherwise quite consistent. For example, in any larger collection of text it is exceedingly likely that there will be very few or no nouns among the top 10 words, even though numerically nouns clearly dominate over other word classes in the lexicon. In frequency lists function words clearly dominate because they are the brick and mortar of writing.
I’ll leave it at that for today, but the second part of this little style comparison will be posted shortly. Stay tuned.
Dec 15th, 2006 | BMC Software, Bocada, Corporate Blogging, HP, Intuit, Microsoft, Nokia, Six Apart, Sprint, TiVo, U3 | 6 Comments
… they were young and full of hopes and dreams, but their owners abandoned them in their infancy. Maybe the eulogy for some of the blogs on my list could read like that. As a number of smart people (e.g. Easton Ellsworth, Debbie Weil) have pointed out, it is immensely important to keep blogging and to not underestimate the time and energy that goes into it. Just quietly ducking out makes a company look bad; it makes the whole endeavor appear a bit like a failed experiment.
Anyway, here’s my list of deceased corporate blogs, ordered by degree of their putrefaction (last post in brackets):
#1 Ray Ozzie, Microsoft (1 April 2006)
I’m sure MS’s chief technologist is hella busy, but so is Jonathan Schwartz and he has been posting steadily for years. Ray went into the corner after just 6 rounds (or posts) and he’s been catching his breath since April. Methinks the introduction of Vista should have given him plenty to blog about. Was blogging just a plug for Live Spaces? What does Scoble think (I’m just curious, honest)?
#2 QuickBooks Online Edition - The Team Blog, Intuit (9 May 2006)
Silent since May, though the record was good before that. After about a year, maybe all questions on QuickBooks Online had been answered? We’ll never know - they didn’t even say goodbye.
#3 Things That Make You Go Wireless, Sprint (9 Jul 2006)
Sprint replaced their blog with with a podcast (the link points there now). Probably not a bad choice for them.
#4 The Bocada Blog, Bocada (28 Jul 2006)
A prototypical example for an abandoned blog: 181 words, 17 sentences, 4 posts in total in 2 months - then nothing. What went wrong?
#5 TiVo Blog, TiVO (18 Aug 2006)
There should be plenty for these guys to blog about, if you consider what is happening with television at the moment. But they’ve been MIA for four months, after only 11 posts. Maybe allowing comments would have made things more lively.
#6 Mena Trott, Six Apart (30 Aug 2006)
Considering what Six Apart does, Mena’s prolonged silence might seem a bit ironic. Is she too busy enabling other people’s blogging to blog herself? No, she isn’t, she just likes it better over on Vox. She does seem to have given up on strictly corporate blogging though. Any reason, Ms. Trott?
I’m jealous of you, by the way. You’re just two months older than me and you have both been to Tokyo and live in the Bay Area, two things I’m still working on. Watch out, I’m on your heels.
#7 Dan Socci, HP (12 Sep 2006)
The only one on the list that has not just been abandoned, but deleted. See archive.org for proof of its passing. No worries Dan, your five posts are safe for posterity in my indestructible linguistic database. Your blog on “HP’s industry leading support services which provide innovative support of HP products and also help customers manage their IT environment operations more efficiently across all vendor platforms” may be gone, but it is not forgotten. And believe me, in my statistics all those juicy adjectives make a nice dent under “suasive language”.
#8 Tom Bishop, BMC Software (3 Sep 2006)
The CTO of business software maker BMC apparently has business elsewhere.
#9 Kate Purmal, U3 (20 Sep 2006)
Maybe Kate ran out of reasons why U3 Smart Drives are great? Sorry, I just couldn’t resist. It’s simply astonishing how she managed to mention the company product in virtually every single post.
#10 Nokia N90 Blog, Nokia (26 September 2006)
The blurb on the site states: “Here you will find blogger and media information that you can repurpose and utilize in your blog postings about the N90“. It may have enough for a catalogue, but not enough for a blog. Perhaps to keep a marketing blog running, you need something with more contextual longevity than just the product? She’s still blogging…
Comments?
Dec 11th, 2006 | Corporate Blogging, Cox Communications, Definitions, GE, McDonald's, Microsoft, Novell, Wells Fargo | 8 Comments
Here’s a list of explanations of the term blog, taken from seven different corporate sites:
Blogs are Web pages which are updated frequently, written from the point of view of an individual, written in an informal tone, and usually expose (sic) an RSS feed for syndication.
from: Microsoft Community Blogs
While we provide a Cox point of view, we also shoot for a balanced discussion that’s light on bull and heavy on substance. We air third-party commentary and even views from those who just might disagree with us.
from: DigitalStraightTalk (Cox)
We live in a constantly changing world where the issues are complex and solutions anything but simple. With such complex issues, we may not always agree on the root causes or best solutions, but we can have a conversation.
from: Open for Discussion (McDonald’s)
We hope that, through this blog, understanding the trials and successes that communities have experienced in natural disasters will propel you to develop your plans for disaster preparedness.
from: Guided by History (Wells Fargo)
From Edison’s Desk [..] offers a unique forum for technology enthusiasts around the globe to discuss the future of technology with top researchers from one of the world’s largest and most diverse industrial research labs.
from: From Edison’s Desk (GE)
Novell Open PR gives Novell watchers information about what’s happening in the company that might not make the cut for a press release, but is still of interest to the market and Novell’s customers.
from: Novell Open PR (Novell)
A blog (short for web log) is a web site containing dated entries. Think of it like an online journal. Blogs are usually written in the first person by an individual or group of folks, and they update regularly, sometimes every day. There are many different kinds of blogs […].
from: Earthling (Earthlink)
I’ve collected this little round-up of quotes to show that there is hardly a consistant view of what a blog is or does in the corporate world (not that there was any reason to assume otherwise).
The definition to fall back on is the strictly formal-technical one: blogging is a form of web-based publishing and blogs are websites (or parts of websites) which are managed via a specialized content-mangement software. They usually consist of entries displayed on the main page in reverse chronological order and usually have an archive of older entries. Beyond that - i.e. when thinking about the possible functions of blogs - things get a lot more complicated.
The reason for the high degree of variation is that the blogs listed above serve a variety of purposes, and each applies its own “blogging philosophy” to the explanation given. At the same time, I think it’s safe to assume that the blogging practices of those companies are also shaped by what they believe (”good” / “real” / “correct” etc) blogging to be. Let’s look at a few definitions.
Microsoft lists four aspects, one formal (post frequency), one technical (”exposing” RSS feeds) and two stylistic ones (point of view and informal tone). The technical ones aren’t entirely unproblematic. Is it not a blog if I post infrequently? Is every source which provides - sorry, exposes - an RSS feed a blog? But these things are commonly cited because stylistic aspects are even harder to nail down. “Informality” is very much in the eye of the beholder (see here for one end of the scale, here for the other). College professors, teenagers, CEOs and housewives all have their own understanding of what informal language looks (or sounds) like. And what about personal point of view? It seems to apply to most blogs, but there are counter-examples. For example, the Thomson Holiday Blog currently has a word count of several thousand strings in my database, with a mere four instances of the personal pronoun “I”. It is also posted anonymously (as are many product blogs) and comments are quite scarce.
Cox completely omits formal aspects and highlights content instead, committing itself to “substance” and a “balanced discussion” which is contrasted with “bull”. The discursive quality of blogs - different parties expressing controversial opinions - is marked here as the most important characteristic of the blog. The almost complete lack of comments in Digital Straight Talk speaks a somewhat different language. Cox seems to be experimenting with a sort of talk-radio approach to blogging, especially when smacking about its favorite competitor.
McDonald’s similarly highlights discussion (or - subtly toning it down - conversation). The Open for Discussion blog is a part of the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy. It is authored by the senior director for CSR, Bob Langert, and his staff. Open for Discussion is interesting because it presents the example of a much-criticized company walking on a sort of public relations blogging tightrope. Langert responds to comments quite frequently - a practice which is absolutely not the norm, especially in a blog that is so clearly image-related. Many of the comments are highly critical of McDonald’s’ business practices and accuse the company of using the CSR initiative purely for cosmetic effect (see this exchange). The challenge to Langert and Co. is to be as diplomatic as possible, while never being too drastic in the acknowledgment of possible mistakes. The discursive practice and McDonald’s’ openness in engaging in it with the public takes precedence over the issues, because the issues remain controversial (”we may not agree […] but we can have a discussion”). That is not to say that the company isn’t serious about the CSR program, but showing McDonald’s’ ability to accept criticism without admitting defeat seems to be the key function of the Open for Discussion.
Wells Fargo and GE don’t care too much about the ontological status of blogs but get right down to business. Guided by History (Wells Fargo) relates the stories of natural disasters to remind us to get insurance… why not from Wells Fargo? Similarly, GE’s focus is on research on the topical level, but on the functional level From Edison’s Desk is about image and possibly recruiting. Both are innovative strategies in my opinion, and they contradict the idea that some kind of constant visible interaction with a community (e.g. via comments) is always an equally vital measure of blog success. GE doesn’t need to appeal to just everybody: what counts is that junior researchers and tech journalists will see the blog as an indicator of the company’s innovativeness.
Novell makes an interesting qualitative distinction when announcing to blog things that might not make the cut for a press release. Press releases are given the “official” and “universally relevant” stamps, whereas blog entries are characterized as containing more general-purpose, less essential information. This hierarchy of relevance is hardly surprising, considering that press releases are an entrenched form of text while blogs are still young. Question is, of course, why the two are regarded as separate concepts at all, especially when assuming the former to be a kind of text and the latter to be a mode of publishing? Why not blog press releases? What about the technology of a blogging software makes it necessary to write differently or present different information than you would with a PM?
Alright, I’ve decided to stick the rest of this round-up into another post because, as usual, I’m far from done. Yeah, so much for writing shorter entries
