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The term Blogs (= Web Logs) was coined in 1997 and since then blogging has quickly become
another killer application for Web-based communication. While the domestication of email took
many years, blogs became domesticated in a much shorter time [
Baron
,
2008
], probably because
usage of the Web was already quite common. Blogging is now a common way for people to freely
publish their thoughts about almost any conceivable topic on the Web and to engage in online
discussions. These discussions are forms of text conversations. After an initial contribution is posted,
for instance a news article, a proposal, question, or review, anyone can comment about it, and all these
additional comments can in turn generate possibly long threads of further discussion. Similarly, to
emails, the growth of the blogosphere (the space of all blogs) has been astonishing. According to a
report published by Technorati in 2008
4
the blogosphere had consistently doubled every 5 months
for the preceding 4 years and the size was estimated to be, at that time, approximately 133 million
blogs. More recent data come from a new report released by eMarketer in 2010
5
. In that year, 51% of
U.S. internet users, or 113 million people, read blogs on a monthly basis. By 2014, the blog audience
is expected to rise to 60% of internet users, or 150 million people. The number of bloggers was also
predicted to grow, though somewhat more modestly. In 2010, 11.9% of U.S. internet users keep
blogs. By 2014, there will be 33.4 million bloggers in the U.S., representing 13.3% of internet users.
Notice that the numbers from this report are underestimates, as eMarketer counts only people who
blog, excluding marketers or media companies with public-facing blogs.
In spite of the phenomenal growth of email, instant messaging and blogs, it seems that new
forms of social media, where people can engage in text conversations, are being constantly created.
And their rate of domestication becomes shorter and shorter. For some users, Twitter and Facebook
have become the social media of preference. Twitter, a site for micro-blogging, also called the “SMS
micro-
blogs
of the Internet”
6
, was launched in 2006. It currently has an estimated 200 million users
7
, generating
65 million tweets a day
8
and handling over 800,000 search queries per day. Tweets are short messages
tweets
of up to 140 characters that are often used in online text conversations
9
.
Facebook, launched in 2004, is the undisputed leading social network, with 150 million users
in the U.S. and half a billion worldwide. In Facebook, people constantly engage in conversations
by sending messages to their friend (an email-like service), talking via Facebook chat (an instant
messaging service), and writing on their personal walls.
A very recent survey by the Pew Research Centre
10
asked people to indicate which activities
they took part in online. Figure
1.2
shows those activities that are partly or entirely of a conversational,
social nature. While email is clearly an established part of most people's lives, it is also true that other
6
SMS stands for
short messaging service
9
38% of tweets are conversational according to a 2009 study by the market research firm Pear Analytics
www.pearanalytics.
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