Adolescent Diary Weblogs and the Unseen Audience    

This paper first situates adolescent diary weblogs and their implied audiences and then applies a typology of audiences for personal narrative performance to a sample of diary weblog posts to ascertain if the typology fits the implied audiences present in the weblog text.

Scheidt, Lois Ann. Indiana University (2005). Articles>Writing>Web Design>Blogging

Advanced Blogger  

Blogger's primary advantage is its simplicity--if you accept the default settings and host on BlogSpot, you can be up and running within five minutes. Once you have your blog, you'll find it's just as easy to customize it.

Doctorow, Cory, Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott and Mena G. Trott. O'Reilly and Associates (1998). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Anatomy of a Weblog

In some sense, weblogs sum up what's so great about the Internet. Like fanzine editors before them, weblog editors embrace a topic or theme and run with it. Weblogs are a great indicator of what's happening on the Internet and within the web community.

Barrett, Cameron. Camworld (2005). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

The Art of Blogging, Part 1: Overview, Definitions, Uses, and Implications

Innovations build on existing perceptions and structures - at least until the new ideas are fully manifested. Then, the innovation discards the shackles of the old model and stands on its own merits and strengths. The development of video is often used to support this phenomenon. Video was initially used only to tape existing live stage performances - a new concept built on the perceptional structure of the existing. True innovation in this medium did not occur until someone recognized the uniqueness of video, and the limitations of live stage shows.

Siemens, George. elearnspace (2002). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

The Art of Blogging, Part 2: Getting Started, "How To", Tools, Resources

The best way to learn to blog is to blog. Fortunately, getting started is fairly simple. Three main options exist: hosted, remote server, and desktop.

Siemens, George. elearnspace (2002). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Banned from Other Blog Sites

Freedom of expression is not ruling the blogosphere, because insecure bloggers will block your attempt to post comments, or even read their blog, should they decide you are "too controversial" or "too different from me". Opinionated blogs are the worst culprits of cowardly post blocking.

Streight, Steven. Blogger.com (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Battlecat Then, Battlecat Now: Temporal Shifts, Hyperlinking and Database Subjectivities

Like all media forms, the blog is not transparent. The technological code of the software contains affordances that filter and, in part, determine the constitution of the private/public Self represented in any weblog. And so, what kind of Self (or Selves) are made possible or enabled by typical blogging practice?

Jarrett, Kylie. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Beyond the Blog: Wikis and Blikis

Blogs are about to give way to a new development. Wikis are web sites within which any user can quickly and easily edit much of the content, without HTML. This idea regarding user-generated online content goes beyond the comment posting of a standard blog. Blikis are blogs that have wiki support, so that users can edit the comments posted.

Streight, Steven. Blogger.com (2005). Articles>Web Design>Wikis>Blogging

Big List of Blog Search Engines

My new theory on blogging is that whenever I can't find a particular piece of information on Google I should just create it myself. What's the point of all this easy-to-use publishing technology if you don't publish stuff, right?

Aripaparo.com (2002). Articles>Web Design>Search>Blogging

The Blog Realm: RSS, Aggregators, and Reading the Blog Fantastic

The content management capabilities of blog software and the search options from Daypop provide incentives for information professionals to be aware, at least, of blogging. But for every blogger out there, there are probably a dozen or more others who prefer reading to writing.

Notess, Greg R. Online Magazine (2002). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Blog Survey: Expectations of Privacy and Accountability

Reports the findings from an online survey conducted between January 14th and January 21st, 2004. During that time, 486 respondents answered questions about their blogging practices and their expectations of privacy and accountability for the entries they publish online.

Fernanda, Viégas. MIT (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Blog Voice: How to Command Attention

With over 4 million distinct blog voices in the blogosphere, how can you differentiate yourself? By being an interesting voice. Interesting voices are made, not born, and now you can learn some ways to become more interesting and influential in blogdom. CAUTION: not for boring blah blah blah bloggers who are smug and self-satisfied.

Streight, Steven. Blogger.com (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Blogging as Social Activity, or, Would You Let 900 Million People Read Your Diary?  

'Blogging' is a Web-based form of communication that is rapidly becoming mainstream. In this paper, we report the results of an ethnographic study of blogging, focusing on blogs written by individuals or small groups, with limited audiences. We discuss motivations for blogging, the quality of social interactivity that characterized the blogs we studied, and relationships to the blogger¡¯s audience. We consider the way bloggers related to the known audience of their personal social networks as well as the wider 'blogosphere' of unknown readers. We then make design recommendations for blogging software based on these findings.

Nardi, Bonnie A., Diane J. Schiano and Michelle Gumbrecht. Comcast (2003). Articles>Web Design>Blogging>Social Networking

Blogging Goes Legit, Sort Of

Despite the timeliness of the issues, many bloggers are wondering whether their craft can be taught in journalism school.

Shachtman, Noah. Wired (2002). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs  

Weblogs (blogs)--frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence--are the latest genre of Internet communication to attain widespread popularity, yet their characteristics have not been systematically described. This paper presents the results of a content analysis of 203 randomly-selected weblogs, comparing the empirically observable features of the corpus with popular claims about the nature of weblogs, and finding them to differ in a number of respects. Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented towards external events, and under-estimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self-expression. Based on the profile generated by the empirical analysis, we consider the likely antecedents of the blog genre, situate it with respect to the dominant forms of digital communication on the Internet today, and advance predictions about its long-term impacts.

Herring, Susan C., Lois Ann Scheidt, Sabrina Bonus and Elijah Wright. (We)blog Research on Genre Project, The (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs

Weblogs (blogs) have been heralded as a new space for collaborative creativity, a medium for breaking free of the constraints of previous forms and allowing authors greater access to flexible publishing methods. This generalization seems extreme: genre studies done by Crowston and Williams (2000) and Shepherd and Watters (1998) lend credence to the notion that weblogs are evolutionary descendents of other visual media, such as newspapers and pamphlets. In this study, we apply content-analytic methods (Bauer, 2000) to a random sample of weblogs as a means of exploring current visual trends within the blogosphere.

Scheidt, Lois Ann and Elijah Wright. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Content Delivery in the "Blogosphere"

While a few educators have already started using blogs in the classroom, more have focused on the potential of blogging in teaching and learning.

Ferdig, Richard E. and Kaye D. Trammell. T.H.E. Journal (2004). Articles>Web Design>Communication>Blogging

Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis "From the Bottom Up"  

The 'blogosphere' has been claimed to be a densely interconnected conversation, with bloggers linking to other bloggers, referring to them in their entries, and postingcomments on each other's blogs. Most such characterizations have privileged a subset of popular blogs, known asthe 'A-list.' This study empirically investigates the extent to which, and in what patterns, blogs are interconnected, taking as its point of departure randomly-selected blogs. Quantitative social network analysis, visualization of linkpatterns, and qualitative analysis of references and comments in pairs of reciprocally-linked blogs show thatA-list blogs are overrepresented and central in the network, although other groupings of blogs are moredensely interconnected. At the same time, a majority of blogs link sparsely or not at all to other blogs in the sam-ple, suggesting that the blogosphere is partially interconnected and sporadically conversational.

Herring, Susan C., Inna Kouper, John C. Paolillo, Lois Ann Scheidt,Michael Tyworth, Peter Welsch, Elijah Wright and Ning Yu. (We)blog Research on Genre Project, The (2005). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Deep Thinking About Weblogs

Weblogs are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore for those of us who spend much time reading the Web. Also known by the inscrutable nickname 'blogs', weblogs are something of a hard nut to crack. Compounding the difficulty is the fact that a great deal of weblog content today is about weblogs and weblog technology. What are weblogs? What's the big deal? Why should we pay attention? We attempt to answer these questions in the essay that follows.

Grumet, Andrew. Grumet.net (2002). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Fame Fatale

When did weblogs stop filtering the web and begin cluttering it instead? Rich Robinson on digital glut and creative solutions.

Robinson, Richard. List Apart, A (2000). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Handling Negative Feedback on Blogs

Despite blogs’ potential for creating valuable online communities, many communicators are still uneasy with the blog format. Communicators worry about the possibility of readers posting negative comments and feedback on the company blog. Angry customers leaving stories of poor experiences for all to see or employees submitting bitter public complaints are nightmare scenarios for most communicators. So how should we respond to negative feedback on corporate blogs? The process begins with shifting our perspective to see the risks as opportunities.

Drennan, Scott. Communication World Bulletin (2007). Articles>Web Design>Community Building>Blogging

The History of Weblogs

Weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles.

Winer, Dave. Weblogs.com (2003). Articles>Web Design>History>Blogging