Hi Radhika and AoIRers-- I've been reading the LJ research communities and such forever, and the answer to your question seems to be that there IS no good answer. Besides the folks on my panel for the American Anthropological Association meetings in the fall, and the citations I list below, a couple of people have written dissertations, which I'll be glad to point you to once my computer comes back from the repair shop. However, the LJ staff has actually ceased to help social science researchers because they never seem to produce anything or give anything back to the community. For my part, I'm not sure how to give back to the community--I posted in the main LJ-research community saying my stuff was done, pointing people to the abstract, and mentioning that I'd be glad to send my research out, and nobody's been interested in it. Here's what I have that directly addresses livejournal. The communities <lj user=metajournal> and <lj user=lj_research> also address these issues. As always, I'd really appreciate more sources! There's also a lot of little applets that map friends networks and interests which could be useful in a research way--I have a collection of these too. --kathy Google scholar brought me these: Contribution in Online Communities http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:g3YuQ9Zj-jEJ:www-2.cs.cm... Social Network Analysis on the Semantic Web http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:7L20xbkJ1LUJ:www.blognin... Achieving Privacy in Hyperblogging Communities http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:4x-M9DRe864J:www.sics.se... Running Head: Language Use Surrounding September 11 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:4zPLchN_VkoJ:homepage.ps... Implicit Links in Asynchronous Communication http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:AthzwW2fQDsJ:www.datawar... A Matter of Life or Death:Modeling Blog Mortality http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:dvGy46OUt6IJ:research.mi... Structure & Evolution of Blogspace http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1040000/1035162/p35-kumar.html?key1=1035162&... the following were taken from a blog bibliography, which I have but do not have a citation for--I know it's by someone with the e-mail address lscheidt@indiana.edu--if you are this person I would love the citation: Kendall, Lori (2003). Diary of a Networked Individual: Interpersonal Connections on LiveJournal. Presented at the meeting of the AoIR 4.0, Association of Internet Research, Toronto Canada. Lin, Jia & Halavais, Alexander (2004). Mapping the Blogosphere in America. In 13th World Wide Web Conference. New York: The International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Retrieved June 30, 2004 from http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/www2004linhalavais.pdf. Abstract: This short paper constitutes the first phase of a long-term project focused on probing American urban culture by examining the hyperlinks and text of personal weblogs. It discusses methods of extracting geographic location information from weblogs and ways of indexing weblogs to city units. After a brief introduction to the broader research plan, the paper proposes a process to automatically extract geographic information from different weblogs. From both theoretical and practical perspectives, we will explain and justify the rationale of using 3-digit zip codes as units for comparing urban cultures. A distribution of American bloggers registered with Livejournal and Diaryland, two popular blog hosting services, will be presented to demonstrate the geocoding of the blogosphere, and to compare the distribution of these two hosts in terms of concentrations of populations and demographic profiles. Finally, we will discuss how to further improve the indexing methods. Paolillo, John, Wright, Elijah, and Mercure, Sarah (Feb., 2005). Mood, Music and Friends: Mapping the Culture of LiveJournal. Presented at the meeting of the Sunbelt XXV, International Network for Social Network Analysis, Redondo Beach CA. Abstract: LiveJournal is a popular weblog/community hosting service with over five million predominantly young, female users from the US. Although reported ages range from 13 to 55, and users hail from 240 different counties, users nonetheless experience LiveJournal as having its own distinct culture. How is this culture created, and is it observable in the posts and profiles of LiveJournal's users? To address these questions, we collected a snowball sample of LiveJournal user profiles, containing information about users' interests and friends, as selfreported and regularly maintained through a web form-based interface. Principal components analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis were used to analyze the interests and social positions of a subset of users (approximately 10,000) for whom complete information was available. The results were visualized in a series of reduced sociograms, which were used as a guide to select representative blogs for qualitative content analysis. The results reveal that there is a highly-structured core of LiveJournal users with well-defined and contrasting sets of interests as well as a large periphery defined by sets of contrasting, but less coherent interests. Qualitative analysis confirms the existence of these groups, and shows them to be correlated with off-line subcultural styling (e.g. goth, punk, etc.). Musical taste is the clearest correlate of group membership, while weak-tie channels of interaction relate the groups to one another. LiveJournal is thus a dynamic social market where youthful users craft and explore their public identities in ways that conform to off-line social categories, often through the commoditized world of popular music. The mechanisms of this process are exposed through the publicly-available profiles and posts of millions of users of LiveJournal and other weblog sites. Raynes-Goldie, Kate (Dec., 2004). Pulling sense out of today's informational chaos: LiveJournal as a site of knowledge creation and sharing. First Monday, 9(12).http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_12/raynes/index.html. Abstract: The informational overload currently facing Western society is changing the way we understand the world as well as rendering obsolete our current ways of managing information and creating knowledge. With these changes in mind, I will examine the blogging service LiveJournal as a new and more applicable way of managing information and creating knowledge in today's society. -- Katherine Mancuso academic, interrupted. new e-mails (don't use sc dot edu) personal: kmancuso at gmail dot com professional: katherine dot mancuso at emory dot edu Because long sig quotes are annoying, read mine below instead: http://www.echonyc.com/~janedoe/writing/selflove.html Anthropologists and labor unions allied: http://AAAUnite.blogspot.com Orphan Films (22-26 March 2006, CFP): http://www.sc.edu/filmsymposium Social software research linkage: http://del.icio.us/museumfreak