Since posting a condensed version of my thesis online, a few people have asked some questions or left feedback about it. I’ve been a bit busy as of late so I haven’t responded as quickly as I usually do to such matters. Apologies and excuses aside, here are my responses to the feedback/questions I’ve received:

  • Rob Goodspeed gave a fairly accurate and thorough review of my thesis, which I don’t have much to disagree with. Due to the labor-intensive nature of gathering comment data, I should note that I only collected comments for the Kuwait community. My observations about conversation-starters and conversation-supporters are only for the Kuwait community (but I believe that this typology probably holds for much of the blogosphere). Rob also compares my network diagrams with the long tail theory. Essentially, my diagrams are a different way of visualizing the long tail. In the blogosphere, there are a small number of highly linked-to blogs and a large number of blogs that receive a small number of links.
  • Carl asked about the final node count of the comments network. I gathered 3943 comments left on 468 blog posts from 89 blogs. There were a little over 630 nodes (comment authors/bloggers). The indegree of the most central node (the blog that received the comments from the most number of readers) was 100 (meaning this blog received comments from 100 different bloggers/comment authors during the 2 week sampling frame).
  • Shirazi criticized (see the comments section) my selection of the blog communities citing that “blogs by nature do not recognize geographical boundaries.” It is true that computer-mediated communication is not bound by geography, nonetheless research has shown that bloggers do tend to cluster along geographical boundaries [full paper][short summary]. In the Middle East specifically, we find that Arab bloggers tend to link, read, and comment on blogs from their own countries (not even the entire Middle East). In the specific cases of the communities that were part of my thesis study, Lada Adamic, my thesis adviser, and I recently did some further analysis and proved that bloggers in these communities do interact with each other [full paper, see section 3.5 specifically]
  • Hamad Alhomaizi asked about the differences between the offline/online relationship correlation between Kuwait and UAE. I think these differences could be explained due to the differences seen in each community. The Kuwait blogosphere is almost entirely made up of Kuwaitis, the UAE blogosphere, on the other hand, is almost entirely made up of expatriates living in the UAE.
  • Along with asking a similar question about the differences between the Kuwait and UAE bloggers, nibaq states: “While I was reading it I couldn’t help getting this feeling that I was on a psychologists couch asking if I have sexual thoughts about gophers as Noor is smoking a cigar.” Heh, well, I don’t smoke cigars (or anything else for that matter) and I’m not planning on holding any Dr. Melfi sessions but I suppose the constraints of academic writing have made my thesis sound academic and clinical!
  • Amy, Erika, and Zahra asked for thesis t-shirts. Srah thinks I’m a dork for answering their request.
  • Marius said something in Romanian. Umm, thanks for the mention . . . even if I can’t read it!

Thanks to everyone who read (or skimmed) the online presentation of my thesis. Getting to respond to questions and comments about my work has been a great learning process and a lot of fun, too.