Blogging Together: An Examination of Group Blogs

This paper presents the first examination of the growing phenomenon of multi-author, or group blogs.  Using a large collection of blog posts gathered over an eight month period, we conducted some quantitative assessments.  Multi-author blogs were found to differ significantly from single-and-two author blogs on several quality metrics, including having longer posts on average and being ranked higher according to an in-link metric.  Visualization of patterns of posting revealed that individual authors often dominate the posts in multi-author blogs, and that in some cases tags are shared, but usually not extensively.