Profile of a Polish Blogger

POLAND: The 5th annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers was held last week at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. The number of blog panels shot through the roof this year showing that academic, empirical research on blogs has really taken off.

At the conference, I presented a paper co-authored with Alek Tarkowsi from Central European University and Jusytna Hofmokl from the Polish Academy of Sciences. Our paper title was simple: Republic of Blog (Rzeczpospolita Blogów). In the few short years that blogging has been present in on the Polish cyberscape it has taken over, making Poland one of the most quickly adopting blog nations.

We performed a content analysis of 358 randomly selected front pages of Polish language blogs hosted on the blog.pl service. The front pages were collected in August. The structure of the Polish language allowed us to accurately identify the gender of 82.4% of the bloggers.

Blogographics

• 3 out of 4 bloggers were women (74.2%)
• 1/5 of the blogs contained a biography statement (19.0%)
• Only 2.5% of the blogs had a “topic” or “mission” statement
• 21.5% of the blogs had contact information, commonly as an IM screen name
• Blogroll on 81.8% of the blogs analyzed
• Only 1.4% bloggers posted pictures of themselves

Motivations

Using the uses & gratifications theory, the blogs' posts contained the following motivations (more than one motivation can be present):

• Self-expression – 82.4%
• Social interaction – 59.5%
• Entertainment - 51.7%
• Passing time – 24.3%
• Information - 8.4%
• Professional advancement – 2.2%

We hypothesized that the overall theory motivation "social utility” would be the most predominant motivation; this was supported. We also hypothesized that “self-expression” would be a more frequent motivation for writing blog posts than “social interaction” ; this was supported as well.

Pole profile

The Polish media paint the blog scene as a very intellectual, political forum. However, like the English-language blogs this appears not to be the case for the masses. Indeed, 92.2% were personal “journals” or read like “diaries.” Additionally, the English-language finding that most bloggers were teenage girls holds true in the Polish population as well.

For the most part, bloggers do not reach into the outside world to refer to society or politics. Instead, they stay close to what they know & experience in everyday life. These blogs were very tied to the offline persona & did not seem to serve as a vehicle for a unique “online personality.” Rather, the bloggers talked about friends on a first name basis (not explaining who each of the characters were). These blogs merely reinforced existing, offline identity and relationships & were not being used to cultivate a new identity online.

The Polish language structure offered us a unique opportunity to investigate gender differences. Females were more likely to be motivated by social interaction than males. Additionally, they were more likely to talk about feelings/thoughts, discuss a memory, provide a record of the day and feature graphics within the post. Males were more likely to discuss a hobby or interest than females All of these findings were statistically significant.

Blog stealing was a very frequent occurrence in the blog.pl blogs. A “thief” would hack into a blog.pl blog & start posting for himself & proclaim that it was “his blog now.” Many times the original blogger would go back into blog, change the password & then reclaim the blog space.

Final thoughts

What we think of in regards to blogging is not representative of what is actually out there. At AoIR, Lilia Efimova, mathemagenic, called for more genre analysis of blogs. Diaries, political blogs, & knowledge logs should not be analyzed in one lump sum. She believes that we have to look at each blog subculture differently to better understand what is going on out there.

Citation - If you would like to cite these findings, please use the following reference:

Trammell, Kaye D., Tarkowski, Alek, & Hofmokl, Justyna. (2004, September). “Rzeczpospolita blogów: Identifying the uses & gratifications of Polish bloggers.” Paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers annual conference, University of Sussex, England.

If you have any questions regarding this research, please contact Kaye Trammell.