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The aim of this paper is to gauge how academic libraries treat publishing a blog.

As blogging becomes more popular, the question arises as to whether it should count as scholarship or a creative activity in academic promotion and tenure. To find out, the author sent a link to a questionnaire to several e‐mail lists, inviting academic librarians to answer a short survey.

In total, 73.9 percent of respondents indicated that their institution expects them to engage in scholarly activities and/or publish scholarly articles, 53.6 percent indicated that their performance review committees do not weigh a blog the same as an article published in a peer‐reviewed journal.

As technology changes, policies will need to change.

Libraries may need to adapt to new forms of scholarship. Electronic scholarship needs a mechanism for peer‐review.

The paper is original – the author did not find any other surveys regarding blogging as scholarship in the library literature.

The purpose of this paper is to describe two case studies conducted at the University of Canterbury (UC) which demonstrate the potential of blogging as an internal and external communication tool. The internal blog was used to communicate and manage information for service staff across the library system, while the external blog communicated content and service updates to the academic community.

The paper relates the experience of setting up an internal and external library blog. Selecting blog software and staff training issues are mentioned. The advantages of blogging and the challenges of developing and maintaining readership are discussed, as are criteria for success. A survey of academic staff on their use of information and information technology was also conducted.

Blogs are a successful strategy for disseminating internal information to library staff working in public services. They provide a convenient medium for the transfer of day‐to‐day communication, facilitate best practice and create an archive of institutional knowledge. Blogs are also a valuable tool to communicate targeted subject specific library information to academic staff.

The experience at UC Library suggests that, although faculty are heavy users of the internet, this does not necessarily generalise to their use of blogs, and librarians need to take a leadership role in promoting blog technology as a way of transforming internal communication and external relationships with library users.

Aims to provide a methodology to establishing a campwide‐blog service and the reasons why libraries might consider using blogging software in their institutions.

A summary of the main features of the blogging software.

This article provides an overview of blogging software: what it is, how it works, and its benefits and offers a practical approach to implementation including training, marketing and policy development.

This paper is useful for information management professionals who seek greater understanding of blogging software implementations.

The purpose of this paper is the presentation of a new method for blog quality assessment. The method uses the temporal sequence of link creation events between blogs as an implicit source for the collective tacit knowledge of blog authors about blog quality.

The blog data are processed by the novel method for the assessment of blog quality. The results are compared to Google Page Rank with respect to the Gold Standard, the BlogRazzi Bookmark Rank.

The method is similar or better than Google Page Rank with respect to the chosen Gold Standard.

The major contribution of this paper is the introduction of a novel method for blog quality assessment. Even though its superiority to other and more established methods cannot be proven in the context of this limited study, it enriches the toolset available for blog quality assessment and may become important for a deeper understanding of organizational learning.

The paper aims to explore the performance of redundancy and novelty mining in the business blogosphere, which has not been studied before.

Novelty mining techniques are implemented to single out novel information out of a massive set of text documents. This paper adopted the mixed metric approach which combines symmetric and asymmetric metrics.

The results show that the novelty mining system can detect novel and redundant blogs in the dataset of business blogs with a very high accuracy.

This paper shows that novelty mining techniques can be applied to business blogs to help organizations filter redundant information, and that the cosine and mixed metrics approaches produce better results.

The considerable cost of sending staff to a conference is often not matched by the benefits that the library then gains. The aim of this paper was to maximise the institutional impact of the authors' attendance at the ALIA Click06 conference in Perth, Western Australia by providing a blog of the event and encouraging interaction with colleagues during the conference itself.

The University of Sydney's “Blogs dot Usyd” service provided the platform for the blog, using WordPress software and holding the blog within the usyd.edu.au domain. Prior to the conference postings were done occasionally in order to build up interest in the blog. During the conference, postings were done several times each day using conference or hotel wifi facilities and internet cafes. Pictures were also posted to Flickr. Posts were a mix of informal/contextual and formal/informational.

The response from colleagues was very positive. Usage statistics show that a high proportion of the target audience read the blog with many of them using RSS. Some posts also attracted a number of comments, which often produced results that added value to our original posts. The authors were also surprised to find a high level of interest from the wider library community. In particular, Australian bloggers seem to be forming a strong community bond based around the librariesinteract.info communal blog. Producing the blog enabled the authors to meet with a number of peers, thereby increasing the benefits from the conference activity.

The further use of blogs as staff communication tools during conferences and similar events should be encouraged. This could be linked with staff development activities such as training in blogging and RSS.

The blog differed from most institutional blogs in that it had a tightly defined target audience, a predetermined period of existence and a very tight focus on a single event.

The purpose of this paper is to show how blogging has grown as an online phenomenon.

Examines the way that blogs have become a phenomenon that embrace private authors who go online to write personal diaries through to representatives from different types of commercial, political and voluntary organisations who utilise them for a range of information exchange, debating, promotional and support purposes.

As blogging grows as an online phenomenon its impact in areas such as news, politics, and social networking is being taken ever more seriously. While the internet has been held up by governments as holding great economic and political promise, acting as a vehicle that can enhance public services, empower and engage citizens, and trigger new ways of doing business, the reality in terms of how it is actually applied can be poles apart from the ideal.

The paper provides an overview of blogging and introduces the papers in this special issue.

HR Blog is one of the social technologies systems to allow employees to voice the issues they experience. However, employees’ trust becomes an emerging issue to use HR Blog. This paper aims to investigate the impact level of employees’ trust in using HR Blog and identifying the causes affecting employees’ trust in using HR Blog. Social exchange theory (SET) was adopted as a vehicle to assist in identifying the employees’ trust causes. SET found serves the aim of research because it posits that the relationship between employees and HR Blog is built based on reciprocity, two-way of exchange.

The research adopts a qualitative method, namely, semi-structured interviews. The total number of conducted semi-structured interviews is 46, 38 interviews with HR Blog users and eight interviews with the management of HR Blog.

The present research found that HR Blog is distrusted by the vast majority of employees. The causes of HR Blog distrust were: functionality (mainly the placing the filtration process); lack of feedback and attention to employees in HR Blog; lack of providing tangible outcomes of HR Blog; and absence of HR Blog informative materials and clear guidelines.

This research lies in the fact that it is one of the first studies that focus on employees’ perspectives to empirically identify and investigate their trust factors affecting the use of HR Blog. The study achieved its aim in terms of gaining a better understanding of how to gain and restore employees’ trust to make HR Blog a trusted and effective system in the workplace.

As the pervasiveness of blogging becomes comingled in personal and corporate lives, companies are harvesting useful information from user-generated media. It appears that user-generated media (e.g. blogs, among others) has become an increasingly important way for companies to connect with customers. Though blogging activity is a fast emerging phenomenon, however, to date only a handful of research has been done by scholars about blogging activity. The little research done on blogging has focused on the company perspective; how companies can use blogs to interact with their customers, but did not examine the individual blogger ' s viewpoint. Hence, the main objective of this study is to help fill that void in the literature and ascertain the following: to lay the groundwork for understanding the factors that enhance bloggers ' attitudes toward participating in blogging activity and how bloggers ' attitudes influence their propensity to blog.

A structural model was developed depicting the relationships among key constructs of research interest. This model reflects theories drawn from social psychology and the literature on marketing and information systems. Structural equation modeling (SEM) methodology was used to empirically validate the model and its hypotheses.

Results of the SEM analysis indicated that bloggers ' knowledge, bloggers ' responsiveness to their readers, bloggers ' market mavenism, and bloggers ' social network optimization had a strong influence on attitude which in turn influenced propensity to blog.

This research has certain limitations. First, resource constraints limited the collection of data to only US consumers, so the analysis of this study may only be generalized over population groups within the USA. A future replicating study of this kind would help to verify if the final model of this study holds true in different countries and cultures. A second limitation is that in this study the unit of analysis is at the individual level. Future studies could examine these effects at multiple levels of analysis such as network and business group level, firm level, and country and region level to understand the behavior of bloggers in those settings.

In this paper the two germane theories (e.g. theories of network effect and diffusion of innovation) are presented. Related theoretical rationales form the bases for hypotheses underlying the model framework. The second section discusses the empirical tests and validation of the model and presents the results of the SEM methodology. The final section discusses implications of the findings, summarizes limitations, and offers suggestions for future research.

The purpose of this study is to investigate (1) how female blog users' perceived benefits (i.e. perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, community identification and perceived norm of reciprocity) influence their perceived social capital on fashion blogs, (2) the influence of structural social capital and cognitive social capital on users' relational social capital and (3) the influence of relational social capital on blog loyalty.

Structural equation modeling was performed using 530 useable data collected through an online survey.

The result indicated that perceived usefulness and the norm of reciprocity led to the development of cognitive social capital, while community identification and the norm of reciprocity led to the development of structural social capital. Cognitive and structural social capital both led to the development relational social capital, which in turn influenced blog loyalty.

This study provides insights for a fashion brand marketing strategy that uses fashion blogs to target relevant consumers. It helps firms to understand the factors that lead people to embed their resources in a blog and to learn how the different perceived benefits impact blog users' contributions to the community.