HELPFUL LINKS FOR RESEARCH

Alice E. MarwickDepartment of Media, Culture, and CommunicationNew York UniversityOctober 2008
This is a topical, semi-annotated bibliography of academic research on LiveJournal. Please email alice marwick if you have additions, corrections, or suggestions. The topic organization is only meant to serve as a rough taxonomy for surveying the field rather than anything authoritative - please let me know if you think a particular entry should be recategorized.
Thanks to danah boyd for her initial research on this topic. This bibliography was originally commissioned by LiveJournal, Inc.
Topics
Blogs: LJ as a Blog, Definitions, and Descriptions of Blogging
Location
Communities and Subcultures
Descriptive Studies of Social Practice on LJ
General Descriptive Studies of LJ
Commenting
Friending
Icons
Diaries, Journals and Genre
Experimental Software
FOAF and the Semantic Web
Gender
Identity
Language
Moods and Emotions
Networks, Social Networks, and Social Network Analysis
Linking
Relationships to Other Networks
Pedagogy
Privacy and Anonymity
Russia
Blogs: LJ as a Blog, Definitions, and Descriptions of Blogging
Blog-related studies conceptualize LiveJournal as a blogging site, often in conjunction with Blogger, Blogspot, and Xanga. Some are general sociodemographic studies of bloggers and their habits and motivations (Kumar et. al. 2004; boyd 2006), while others are more abstract conceptualizations of blogs (Baoill 2004; Schmidt 2007). A subset of location-related papers position LJ in a global context to discuss location and mapping of the blogosphere (Lin & Halavais 2004; Gopal 2007).
Baoill, A. Ó. (2004). Conceptualizing the Weblog: Understanding What It Is In Order To Imagine What It Can Be. Interfacings: A Journal of Contemporary Media Studies. http://www.comm.uiuc.edu/icr/interfacings.
boyd, D. (2006). A Blogger's Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium. Reconstruction, 6(4). http://reconstruction.eserver.org/064/boyd.shtml.
Elgersma, E., & Rijke, M. D. (2008). Personal vs. non-personal blogs: Initial classification experiments. In Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (pp. 723-724). Singapore, Singapore: ACM.
Glance, N., Hurst, M., & Tomokiyo, T. (2004). BlogPulse: Automated Trend Discovery for Weblogs. WWW 2004 Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics, 2004.
Graves, L. (2007). The Affordances of Blogging: A Case Study in Culture and Technological Effects. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 31(4), 331-346.
IP, R. K. F., & Wagner, C. (2008). Weblogging: A study of social computing and its impact on organizations. Decision Support Systems, 45(2), 242-250.
Kumar, R., Novak, J., Raghavan, P., & Tomkins, A. (2004). Structure and Evolution of Blogspace. Communications of the ACM, 47(12), 35-39.
Schmidt, J. (2007). Blogging Practices: An Analytical Framework. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4), Article 13. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/schmidt.html
Shirky, C. (2005). A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy. In The Best Software Writing I, Joel Spolsky, ed., 183-209. New York: Apress.
Venolia, G. (2004). A Matter of Life or Death: Modeling Blog Mortality. Microsoft Research Report, Redmond, WA. http://research.microsoft.com/~ginav/ljmodeling.pdf
Location
Su, N., Wang, Y., Mark, G., Aiyelokun, T., & Nakano, T. (2005). A Bosom Buddy Afar Brings a Distant Land Near: Are Bloggers a Global Community? In Communities and Technologies 2005, 171-190. New York: Springer.
Gopal, S. (2007). The evolving social geography of blogs. In Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access, Harvey J. Miller, Ed. Berlin: Springer, 275-294.
Hurst, M., & Intelliseek, I. (2005). GIS [Geographical Information Systems] and the blogosphere. WWW2005, 2nd Annual Workshop on the Blogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics.
Lin, J., & Halavais, A. (2004). Mapping the blogosphere in America. Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem, 13th International World Wide Web Conference.
Communities and Subcultures
These papers examine particular subcultures on LJ, including studies of fanfiction (Busse 2005, 2006; Thomas 2007) gamers (Aupperle 2007), Goths (Hodkinson 2006), photobloggers (Cohen 2005) and vampire enthusiasts (Mellins 2008). They are primarily qualitative and in most case discuss LJ as part of a larger web of technology used by the subculture.
Aupperle, C. (2007). Online Social Interactions of Gamers: A Case Study of LiveJournal Communities. MA Thesis, State University of New York Institute of Technology.
Busse, K. (2005). 'Digital get down': Postmodern boy band slash and the queer female space. Eroticism in American Culture, C. Malcolm and J. Nyman, Eds. Gdansk: Gdansk Univ. Press, 103-25.
Busse, K. (2006). My Life Is a WIP on My LJ: Slashing the Slasher and the Reality of Celebrity and Internet Performances. In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, K. Hellekson and K. Busse, Eds. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 207-24.
Cohen, K. R. (2005). What does the photoblog want? Media, 2005(6), 883-901.
Hodkinson, P. (2006). Subcultural Blogging? Online Journals and Group Involvement among UK Goths. In Use of Blogs, A. Bruns and J. Jacobs, Eds. New York: Peter Lang, 187-198.
Kraemer, J. Beyond the Meaning of Style: Cultural Capital, Social Networks and Youth Subculture. MA Thesis, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL. http://www.styleovercontent.com/public/jkraemer-thesis.pdf
Lawrence, K. F. (2007). The Web of Community Trust - Amateur Fiction Online: A Case Study in Community Focused Design for the Semantic Web. Dissertation, University of Southampton. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14704/.
Mellins, M. (2008). The female vampire community and online social networks: Virtual celebrity and mini communities: Initial thoughts. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 4(2), 254-258.
Seko, Y. (2007). Online Suicidal Murmurs: Analyzing Self-Destructive Discourses in the Blogosphere. MA Thesis, Graduate Program in Communication and Culture, York University (Toronto, Ontario, Canada).
Thomas, A. (2007). Blurring and Breaking through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction. In A New Literacies Sampler, Eds. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, New Literacies & Digital Epistemologies. Vol. 29, 137-166. New York: Peter Lang.
Tosenberger, C. (2008a). "Oh my God, the Fanfiction!": Dumbledore's Outing and the Online Harry Potter Fandom. Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 33(2), 200-206.
Tosenberger, C. (2008b). Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction. Children's Literature, 36, 185-207.
Descriptive Studies of Social Practice on LJ
These studies understand LJ as a unique space with its own particularities, rather than a social network or a blog. As a result, this category has perhaps the most illuminating academic work on LJ, delving into the specifics of user practice. For instance, both Cherny (2005) and Fono & Raynes-Goldie (2005) discuss the implications of the "Friends List" for user interaction, and Raynes-Goldie discusses how LJ's features and communities encourage collective knowledge production (2004). More specifically, Erika Pearson concludes that digital gifts within LJ serve to strengthen social bonds, while Rebaza concludes that icons are used in place of face-to-face gesture (2008) and Tarkowski concentrates on the peer production of icons as a creative, participatory activity (2005).
General Descriptive Studies of LJ
Bandlow, A., & Jensen, P. (2002a). LiveJournal: Personal thoughts in a public forum. Unpublished midterm paper for "The Design of Online Communities" class (CS6470). Georgia Institute of Technology.
Bandlow, A., & Jensen, P. (2002b). LiveJournal: Augmenting the community. Unpublished final paper for "The Design of Online Communities" class (CS6470). Georgia Institute of Technology.
Cherny, L. (2005). Gakking Memes: LiveJournal "Conversation". The Mathworks, Report. Retrieved from http://www.socialcomputingresearch.net/workshop/Cherny2005.
King, A., & Martinez, J. (2005). LiveJournal: Content, Genre, and Personal Security, Unpublished research paper for INF 397C: Introduction to Research in Information Studies. University of Texas at Austin.
MacKinnon, I., & Warren, R. H. (2006). Age and geographic analysis of the LiveJournal social network (p. 18). Technical Report CS-2006-12, School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo.
Medynskiy, Y. & Kaye, J. (2005b). Characterizing LiveJournal: SCCs, LiveRank, & Six Degrees. Cornell Information Science Technical Report.
Raynes-Goldie, K. (2004). Pulling sense out of today's informational chaos: LiveJournal as a site of knowledge creation and sharing. First Monday, 9(12). Retrieved from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_12/raynes/.
Shklovski, I., & Handel, M. (2007) The Journal of La Mancha, or, How to Get 1000 People to Attack an Online Windmill. Unpublished report.
Commenting
Mishne, G., & Glance, N. (2006). Leave a reply: An analysis of weblog comments. In Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics. Edinburgh, UK.
Pearson, Erika. (2007). Digital gifts: participation and exchange in LiveJournal communities. First Monday, 12(5). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_5/pearson/index.html.
Friending
Fono, D., & Raynes-Goldie, K. (2005). Hyperfriendship and beyond: Friendship and social norms on Livejournal. In Internet Research Annual Volume 4: Selected Papers from the Association of Internet Researchers Conference. New York: Peter Lang.
Kendall, L. (2003). Diary of a networked individual: Interpersonal connections on LiveJournal. Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR-4), Toronto.
M. A. Stefanone, & C. Y. Yang. (2007). Writing for friends and family: The interpersonal nature of blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), Article 7. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/stefanone.html
Icons
Rebaza, C. (2008). Online Gestures: Icon Use by Fan Communities on LiveJournal. In 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Hilton Waikoloa Village Resort, Waikoloa, Big Island, Hawaii.
Tarkowski, A. (2005). Peer production of popular culture at the LiveJournal blogging site. Banal blogging or cultural struggle? RE:Activism: Re-Drawing the Boundaries of Activism in New Media Environments, Budapest. http://mokk.bme.hu/centre/conferences/reactivism/submissio%20ns/tarkowski.
Tushnet, R. (2004). Copy This Essay: How Fair Use Doctrine Harms Free Speech and How Copying Serves It. The Yale Law Journal, 114(3), 535-590.
Diaries, Journals and Genre
Positioning LJ as a "journaling" site is different from seeing it as a series of blogs or as a social networking site (SNS). Early research showed that online journals are often seen as female and low-status, while blogs are typically considered male and higher status (See Herring & Kouper 2004 in the "Gender" subcategory). Despite (or perhaps because of) this, there's a great deal more research on blogs than journals. However, Herring & Scheidt's quantitative study of blog types found that most blogs are intimate and individualistic, similar to "diaries" (2004); therefore if we want to understand blogs, we have to understand the online journal.
McNeill 2003 and Sorapure 2003 provide general overviews to the online diary. Laat (2008) asks the common question, "Why do the overwhelming majority of web diarists dare to expose the intimate details of their lives to the world at large?" Although his study is highly theoretical, Laat finds that most diarists assume trustworthiness on the part of their audience, which is frequently violated in practice. Looking at a specific community, both of Hodkinson's pieces are good: the first examines the journals of goth teenagers and notes that they encourage an individual type of sociability (2007), while the second (with Lincoln, 2008) compares the online journal with the adolescent bedroom as a private, significant space of identity expression.
Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. (2004). Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. Hawaii.
Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Wright, E., & Bonus, S. (2005). Weblogs as a Bridging Genre. Information Technology & People, 18(2), 142-171.
Hodkinson, P. (2007). Interactive online journals and individualization. New Media & Society, 9(4), 625-650.
Hodkinson, P., & Lincoln, S. (2008). Online journals as virtual bedrooms: Young people, identity and personal space. Young, 16(1), 27-46.
Johnson, J. L. (2004). Personal stories go worldwide: The ritual of storytelling through Weblogs. MA Thesis, University of North Texas. http://digital.library.unt.edu/permalink/meta-dc-4601:1
Laat, P. B. (2008). Online diaries: Reflections on trust, privacy, and exhibitionism. Ethics and Information Technology, 10(1), 57-69.
Maxwell, R. L. (2005). Online Lives?-Personal Diaries on the Web. BA Thesis, Communication, Ohio State University.
McNeill, L. (2003). Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet. Biography, 26(1), 24-47.
Sorapure, M. (2003). Screening Moments, Scrolling Lives: Diary Writing on the Web. Biography, 26(1), 1-23.
Van Dijck, J. Composing the Self: Of Diaries and Lifelogs. Fibreculture, (3). http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue3/issue3_vandijck.html
Experimental Software
These papers use LJ to present experimental software designed for various uses, such as increasing community contribution (Barry et. al. 2003; Perkowitz 2003), extending mobile use (Kumpu & Rannikko 2004; Pillai 2005), and using instant messaging to map networks (Resig et. al 2004). These studies typically focus on the software being proposed rather than LJ.
Barry, P., Dekel, U., Moraveji, N., & Weisz, J. (2003). Increasing contribution in online communities using alternative displays of community activity levels. School of Computer Science: Carnegie Mellon University. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jweisz/research/docs/bdmw03_CommunityActivityDisplay.pdf.
Kumpu, N., & Rannikko, J. (2004, May). Providing Mobile Friendly Web Services-Implementing Mobile LiveJournal. M.S. Thesis, Tampere University of Technology, Department of Information Technology.
Perkowitz, M., Philipose, M., & McCarthy, J. F. (2003). Utilizing Online Communities to Facilitate Physical World Interactions. In Workshop on the Role of Online Community Spaces in Shaping Virtual Community Interaction, Amsterdam.
Pillai, P. (2005). Experimental mobile gateways. Crossroads, 11(4), 6-6.
Resig, J., Dawara, S., Homan, C. M., & Teredesai, A. (2004). Extracting social networks from instant messaging populations. Workshop on Link Analysis and Group Detection, in conjunction with the 10th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
FOAF and the Semantic Web
These papers use LJ as an exemplar to study the Semantic Web, particularly the Friend of a Friend standard (FOAF) and other social network metadata.
Celma, O., Ramirez, M., & Herrera, P. (2005). Getting music recommendations and filtering newsfeeds from FOAF descriptions. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Scripting for the Semantic Web, 2nd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2005).
Downes, S. (2005). Semantic networks and social networks. The Learning Organization, 12(5), 411-417.
Paolillo, J. C., Mercure, S., & Wright, E. (2005). The social semantics of LiveJournal FOAF: Structure and change from 2004 to 2005. In G. Stumme, B. Hoser, C. Schmitz, and H. Alani (Eds.), Proceedings of the ISWC 2005 Workshop on Semantic Network Analysis, Galway, Ireland, November 7, 2005. http://www.blogninja.com/paolillo-mercure-wright.final.pdf
Paolillo, J. C., & Wright, E. (2005). Social network analysis on the Semantic Web: Techniques and challenges for visualizing FOAF. In V. Geroimenko & C. Chen (Eds.), Visualizing the Semantic Web, 2nd ed. Berlin: Springer. http://www.blogninja.com/vsw-draft-paolillo-wright-foaf.pdf
Gender
LJ is a majority female site. As previously mentioned, the characterization of blogs as male and more "serious" than online journals has contributed to the lack of press and academic attention to journaling sites, which are generally seen as frivolous (Herring & Kouper et. al. 2004). Both Gregg (2006) and Driscoll (2008) look at blogging/journaling as gendered behavior, and how female blogging/journaling has been denigrated and undervalued. Also see the Language section for Huffaker's study of gender difference in blog language.
Cadle, L. (2005). A Public View of Private Writing: Personal Weblogs and Adolescent Girls. PhD Dissertation, Bowling Green State University.
Driscoll, C. (2008). This is not a Blog: Gender, intimacy, and community. Feminist Media Studies, 8(2), 198-202.
Gregg, M. (2006). Posting with passion: Blogs and the politics of gender. In Uses of Blogs, A. Bruns and J. Jacobs, Eds. New York: Peter Lang, 151-160.
Herring, S.C., Kouper, I., Scheidt, L. A. & Wright, E. L. (2004). Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs. In Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html
Ratliff, C. A. (2006). "Where are the women?": Rhetoric and gender in weblog discourse. PhD Dissertation, University of Minnesota.
Tobias, V. (2005). Blog This! An Introduction to Blogs, Blogging, and the Feminist Blogosphere. Feminist Collections, 26(2/3), 11-17.
Identity
LJ can be thought of as both public (audience, comments) and private (journal, friends). These studies discuss the tension between community interaction and identity production on LJ. Kendall (2007) shows how LJers negotiate the public/private split of the site, balancing self-presentation and the desire for community ties with autonomy. Similarly, Lindemann (2005) is interested in how LiveJournals are performed through verbal and communicative skill, creating communities through interactions with audience.
Kendall, L. (2007). 'Shout Into the Wind, and It Shouts Back': Identity and interactional tensions on LiveJournal. First Monday, 12(9), Article 1. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_9/kendall/index.html
Lindemann, K. (2005). Live(s) Online: Narrative Performance, Presence, and Community in LiveJournal.com. Text & Performance Quarterly, 25(4), 354-372.
Senft, T. (2008). Camgirls: Celebrity and Authenticity in the Age of Social Networks, Digital Formations. New York: Peter Lang.
Language
Given that LJ has a broad user base that spans subcultures, localities, and countries, there is a surprising dearth of work on language use in LiveJournal. Herring et. al. studied language use on LJ and found that English dominated globally but not locally and that journals that bridged languages were either written by multilingual individuals or had broadly accessible content, suggesting that much of LJ is segregated by language (2007). Huffaker's work on language focuses on differences between male and female teens; he found that while self-presentation was similar across gender, males were more likely to use emoticons and an active style of language. See also Dunn's paper in the Russia section on Russian language changes due to LJ.
Herring, S. C., Paolillo, J. C., Ramos-Vielba, I., Kouper, I., Wright, E., Stoerger, S., et al. (2007). Language Networks on LiveJournal. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 40(3), 1346.
Howard, R.G. (2008). Electronic Hybridity: The Persistent Processes of the Vernacular Web. Journal of American Folklore, 121(480), 192-218.
Huffaker, D.A. (2004). Gender Similarities and Differences in Online Identity and Language Use Among Teenage Bloggers. MA Thesis, Communication, Culture and Technology, Georgetown University.
Huffaker, D. A., & Calvert, S. L. (2005). Gender, Identity, and Language Use in Teenage Blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(2), Article 1. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/huffaker.html
Moods and Emotions
Since LiveJournal users can and often do define a "mood" with every LJ post, the site has become a very useful corpus for researchers studying blog emotions or moods in text. A group of researchers known as the "MoodTeam" (Gilad Mishne, Maarten de Rijke and Krisztian Balog) have developed a tool set for mood viewing called "MoodViews" (http://moodviews.com/), which tracks, predicts, and seeks to understand LJ mood changes. Other researchers have attempted to define a blogger/journaler's mood based on his or her blog/journal text (Jung et. all 2006; Leshed & Kaye 2006; Jung et. al 2007; Strapparava & Mihalcea 2008).
Balog, K., & de Rijke, M. (2006). Decomposing Bloggers' Moods: Towards a Time Series Analysis of Moods in the Blogosphere. WWW2006, Edinburgh, UK.
Balog, K., & de Rijke, M. (2007). How to Overcome Tiredness: Estimating Topic-Mood Associations. In Proceedings Int. Conf. on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-2007) (Vol. 199). Boulder, Colorado, USA. http://dare.uva.nl/record/265894.
Balog, K., Mishne, G., & de Rijke, M. (2006). Why Are They Excited? Identifying and Explaining Spikes in Blog Mood Levels. In 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Trento, Italy. http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/E/E06/.
De Rijke, M., & Mishne, G. A. (2006). Capturing Global Mood Levels using Blog Posts. In AAAI 2006 Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs (AAAI-CAAW 2006) (pp. 145-152). AAAI Press.
Jung, Y., Park, H., & Myaeng, S. H. (2006). A Hybrid Mood Classification Approach for Blog Text. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 4099, 1099-1103. Berlin: Springer.
Jung, Y., Choi, Y., & Myaeng, S. (2007). Determining Mood for a Blog by Combining Multiple Sources of Evidence. In Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, 271-274. IEEE Computer Society.
Leshed, G., & Kaye, J. (2006). Understanding how bloggers feel: recognizing affect in blog posts. In CHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1019-1024). Montréal, Québec, Canada: ACM.
Mihalcea, R., & Liu, H. (2006). A corpus-based approach to finding happiness. Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Weblogs.
Mishne, G., & de Rijke, M. (2006). MoodViews: Tools for blog mood analysis. In AAAI 2006 Spring Symp. on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs (AAAICAAW 2006).
Mishne, G. (2005). Experiments with Mood Classification in Blog Posts. Stylistic Analysis Of Text For Information Access.
Strapparava, C., & Mihalcea, R. (2008). Learning to identify emotions in text. Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing, 1556-1560.
Networks, Social Networks, and Social Network Analysis
Much academic research uses data sets collected from LJ to study social networks. While some of this work places LJ in the context of other social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (boyd & Ellison 2007; Golbeck 2007), most of it applies social network analysis, a longstanding sociological tool for mapping personal relationships, to LiveJournal networks. This literature is extensive, primarily quantitative ,and computer science oriented.
One category of research focuses on friends, communities, and links. Backstrom et. al (2006) looks at community growth within LiveJournal and concludes that LJers join communities based on whether they already know people within them, but more precisely, whether their friends in the community know each other (see also Golbeck 2007 on network dynamics). Martin & Weninger 2007 and Medynisky 2005 analyze linking practices on LiveJournal and their relationship to the larger network. Koslov 2004 and Backstrom et. al. 2007 look at how anonymity can be compromised by analyzing relationships within a social network.
LJ is also used to describe network structure (Zakharov 2007a, 2007b, 2008) and demonstrate features of social networks such as clustering (Mishra et. al. 2007) and layers and hierarchies (Goussevskaia 2007). Other studies involve measurement (Mislove et. al 2008) and LJ's relationship to other networks (Murnan 2006; Bhagat et. al. 2007).
Backstrom, L., Huttenlocher, D., Kleinberg, J., & Lan, X. (2006). Group formation in large social networks: Membership, growth, and evolution. In Proceedings of 12th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery in Data Mining (pp. 44-54). New York: ACM Press.
Backstrom, L., Dwork, C., & Kleinberg, J. (2007). Wherefore art thou r3579x?: anonymized social networks, hidden patterns, and structural steganography. In Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web (pp. 181-190). Banff, Alberta, Canada: ACM.
boyd, D., & Ellison, N. (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), Article 1. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html.
Crandall, D., Cosley, D., Huttenlocher, D., Kleinberg, J., & Suri, S. (2008). Feedback effects between similarity and social influence in online communities. In Proceeding of the 14th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 160-168). Las Vegas, Nevada, USA: ACM.
Golbeck, J. (2007). The Dynamics of Web-Based Social Networks: Membership, Relationships and Change. First Monday, 12(11). http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2023/1889.
Goussevskaia, O., Kuhn, M., & Wattenhofer, R. (2007). Layers and Hierarchies in Real Virtual Networks. Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, 89-94.
Hildrum, K., & Yu, P. S. (2005). Focused Community Discovery. In Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (pp. 641-644). IEEE Computer Society.
Hsu, W. H., Weninger, T., Pydimarri, T., & Paradesi, M. S. R. (2006). Collaborative and Structural Recommendation of Friends using Weblog-based Social Network Analysis. Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs: Papers from the 2006 AAAI Spring Symposium, 55-60.
Kozlov, S. (2004). Achieving Privacy in Hyper-Blogging Communities: Privacy Management for Ambient Intelligence. In WHOLES: A Multiple View of Individual Privacy in a Networked World. Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Stockholm, Sweden, January 30-31.
Leskovec, J., Lang, K. J., Dasgupta, A., & Mahoney, M. W. (2008). Statistical properties of community structure in large social and information networks. Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web, 695-704. Beijing, China: ACM.
Liben-Nowell, D., Novak, J., Kumar, R., Raghavan, P., Tomkins, A., & Graham, R. L. (2005). Geographic Routing in Social Networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(33), 11623-11628.
Marlow, C. (2005). The Structural Determinants of Media Contagion. PhD Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Marlow, C. (2006). Investment and attention in the weblog community. Research Report, MIT Media Laboratory.
Medynskiy, Y. & Kaye, J. (2005a) Tools for understanding interactions in large social networks. CHI '05 Extended Abstracts On Human Factors In Computing Systems.
Mishra, N., Schreiber, R., Stanton, I., & Tarjan, R. (2007). Clustering Social Networks. In Algorithms and Models for the Web-Graph, 56-67.
Mislove, A., Marcon, M., Gummadi, K., Druschel, P., & Bhattacharjee, B. (2007). Measurement and analysis of online social networks. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement (pp. 29-42). San Diego, CA: ACM.
Zakharov, P. (2007a). Diffusion approach for community discovering within the complex networks: LiveJournal study. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 378(2), 550-560.
Zakharov, P. (2007b). Structure of LiveJournal social network. Noise and Stochastics in Complex Systems and Finance. Edited by Kertész, János; Bornholdt, Stefan; Mantegna, Rosario N. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 6601, 6601-09.
Zakharov, P. (2008, February 2). Thermodynamic approach for community discovering within the complex networks: LiveJournal study. e-print on arxiv.org: physics/0602063. http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0602063
Linking
Martin, W., & Weninger, S. (2007). Structural Link Analysis from User Profiles and Friends Networks: A Feature Construction Approach. International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Boulder, CO.
Medynskiy, Y. (2005). Implicit Links in Asynchronous Communication Spaces. Beyond Threaded Conversations workshop, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Portland, OR.
Relationships to Other Networks
Bhagat, S., Cormode, G., Muthukrishnan, S., Rozenbaum, I., & Xue, H. (2007). No blog is an island-analyzing connections across information networks. Intl. Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Boulder, CO.
Murnan, C. A. (2006). Expanding communication mechanisms: they're not just e-mailing anymore. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual ACM SIGUCCS Conference on User Services (pp. 267-272). Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: ACM.
Pedagogy
The popularity of LJ among high-school and college-aged students has lead some educators to explore its use in the classroom. Bryant (2006) mentions LiveJournal as one of many potential social media resources, while Campbell's study of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is much more specific about LJ's potential to help students learn through its global user base and particular features (2004). Wilbur 2007 looks at how LJ represents new literacy practices among "Millennials" (see also Thomas 2007 in the Subculture section for a discussion of Digital Literacies), but the study has a very small user sample (one student). The lack of research on this topic suggests a rich area for future work.
Bryant, T. (2006). Social Software in Academia. EDUCAUSE QUARTERLY, 29(2), 61.
Campbell, A. P. (2004). Using Livejournal for authentic communication in EFL classes. The Internet TESL Journal, 10(9). http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Campbell-LiveJournal.
Wilber, D. J. (2007). MyLiteracies. Journal of Online Education, 3(4).
Privacy and Anonymity
Compared to other SNS or blogging sites, LiveJournal has a very rich set of privacy features (filters, custom groups, communities, "friends only" posts, and so forth). While some of these studies mention LJ as one of many networks or blogging services (Gross et. al 2005; Qian & Scott 2007), others provide detailed descriptions of LJ's privacy affordances (Kozlov 2004). He & Chu (2006, 2008) and Korolova et. al. 2008 look at how private data can be inferred from social networks and links, using LJ as one of several examples. Viegas's (2005) survey of blogger privacy and anonymity expectations includes a useful discussion of LJ-specific privacy features.
Ford, S. M. (2004). Public and Private on LiveJournal: An Investigation of Bloggers' Opinions and Practices. AOIR 5.0: Sussex: 2004: Ubiquity, Sussex, England. Retrieved September 8, 2008, from http://gsb.haifa.ac.il/~sheizaf/AOIR5/49.html.
Gross, R., Acquisti, A., & H. John Heinz, I. I. I. (2005). Information revelation and privacy in online social networks. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society (pp. 71-80). Alexandria, VA, USA: ACM.
He, J., & Chu, W. (2008). Protecting Private Information in Online Social Networks. Intelligence and Security Informatics: Techniques and Applications, H. Chen and C. Yang, Eds. Vol 135, Springer.
He, J., Chu, W., & Liu, Z. (2006). Inferring Privacy Information from Social Networks. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, 154-165.
Korolova, A., Motwani, R., Nabar, S. U., & Xu, Y. (2008). Link Privacy in Social Networks. IEEE 24th International Conference on Data Engineering, 2008, 1355-1357.
Nagaraja, S. (2007). Anonymity in the Wild: Mixes on Unstructured Networks. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4776, 254.
Qian, H., & Scott, C. R. (2007). Anonymity and Self-Disclosure on Weblogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4), Article 14. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/qian.html
Viegas, F. B. (2005). Bloggers' Expectations of Privacy and Accountability: An Initial Survey. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(3), http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/viegas.html
http://www.danah.org/papers/MEABrokenMetaphors.pdf