I’m very pleased to share this paper, “Blogging at Work and the Corporate Attention Economy.” It was Sarita‘s summer project at HP, and I’m happy to have been a collaborator. She’ll be presenting it at CHI 2009.
Some of the main findings are that blogging behavior is directly related to perceptions about readership and to general support by management for blogging.
Abstract: The attention economy motivates participation in peer-produced sites on the Web like YouTube and Wikipedia. However, this economy appears to break down at work. We studied a large internal corporate blogging community using log files and interviews and found that employees expected to receive attention when they contributed to blogs, but these expectations often went unmet. Like in the external blogosphere, a few people received most of the attention, and many people received little or none. Employees expressed frustration if they invested time and received little or no perceived return on investment. While many corporations are looking to adopt Web-based communication tools like blogs, wikis, and forums, these efforts will fail unless employees are motivated to participate and contribute content. We identify where the attention economy breaks down in a corporate blog community and suggest mechanisms for improvement.
URL: http://redlog.net/papers/blogging_chi09.pdf (PDF)
Citation:Sarita Yardi, Scott A. Golder and Michael J. Brzozowski. Blogging at Work and the Corporate Attention Economy. Proc. CHI 2009.
Scott Golder 
[…] an office with!) Alice Marwick and Sarita Yardi. You may remember Sarita from such papers as Blogging at Work and the Corporate Attention Economy. We worked together last summer and it’s nice to get to do so […]