Study on Collective Memory in the Blogosphere

With the change to Web 2.0 Internet environment and the popularization of blogs, people write various writings freely on the Internet such as daily events, movie reviews, news, etc. Here, we can find writings on personal experiences from the past or on past popular culture. This paper analyzed collective memory through the blogosphere. We define blog posts that qualify as containing collective memory, find the types of collective memory through analyzing comments and trackbacks, and observe how people share their memories and interact with others. The results of the analysis show that blog posts that form a collective memory have more interactions than regular blog posts and that the types of comments include those that provide information, exchange information, and reminisce. Through these results, we derive a model for collective memory and show a prototype of a system based on the model. This study has a significance in that it rediscovers memory activities of people through the analysis of the collective memory phenomenon on the Internet.