Reciprocity, Social Curation and the Emergence of Blogging: A Study in Community Formation

Little empiricism has been brought to bear on the original network of weblogs, and as a consequence the early „history of blogging‟ has remained anecdotal to a very large degree. The present study works from a dataset of the earliest networked weblogs and uses social network analysis to account for the dynamics that brought them together. The study assumes that direct or indirect reciprocity is an indispensable precondition of community formation; in a longitudinal analysis it finds that the introduction and widespread adoption of link crediting, a form of direct reciprocity, precipitated the emergence of the original „weblog community‟ in 1998 as an exchange network engaged in the social curation of the web.