Blogs and Technical Communication

Blogs are a simple, yet powerful tool and their popularity is rapidly growing. How are blogs affecting the community and technical communication?

Cottrell, Christina. Michigan State University (2003). Articles>Content Management>TC>Blogging

Blogs as Disruptive Tech

Content Management is starting to wrestle with what Clayton Christensen calls The Innovator's Dilemma: the inability of successful companies to adapt to a new, disruptive technology.

Hiler, John. Web Crimson (2002). Articles>Content Management>Technology>Blogging

Blogs on the Side

Blogging as a trend has gained enormous popularity with the simplification of automated self-publishing systems, such as Blogger at www.blogger.com, or MT at www.moveabletype.org. Blogging as a way of life is also gathering adherents at a rapid pace.

Young, Lisa. MetroVoice (2003). Articles>Publishing>Online>Blogging

Blogs, A Primer: A Guide to Weblogs in the Classroom and in Research

I want to make two arguments. The first, a largely implicit one, concerns the life cycle of online scholarship and is marked by my added emphasis on the word 'article' in the opening sentence of this essay. My second argument, the explicit one, is about the value of blogging in the writing classroom.

Barrios, Barclay. CCCC Online (2005). Articles>Education>Writing>Blogging

Blogs: The Fast Track to Getting Global Awareness

“We need to get global awareness fast,” says your CEO. “Make it happen.” When faced with the need to rapidly increase your organization’s visibility around the world, there are some daunting and expensive challenges, particularly if your company does not have a local presence in the countries it is targeting. Hiring local public relations and marketing communication talent, translating collateral into local languages and identifying and getting into both formal and informal business networks are just a few of these challenges.

Albrycht, Elizabeth. Communication World Bulletin (2005). Articles>Business Communication>Marketing>Blogging

Blogs: Viral, Targeted, Fast, Informative--And Becoming Critical

The world of blogging, also known as the blogosphere, is wild, highly viral, uncensored and unedited. It is also the newest and most critical tool in a business communicator's toolbox. Why? Because with blogs, communicators can quickly, regularly and easily deliver a variety of information to a highly targeted audience. A good blog will create a more personal relationship with customers and influencers by showing that the company is listening and responding to what they have to say.

Cohen, Ephraim. Communication World Bulletin (2005). Articles>Business Communication>Online>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

CEO Blogs: Polish Them Up Please

CEO Blogs should be vastly superior to any other run of the mill blogs on the web. But in many cases, they're worse. Discover 10 common errors made by CEO bloggers and how to correct them. Plus, a link to a wiki-compiled list of current CEO blogs.

Streight, Steven. Blogger.com (2005). Articles>Writing>Public Relations>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

Conversation by Blog: Expanding Personal Technology into the Academic Community  

In the last two years, individuals on the Web have begun to maintain personal Web sites which are referred to as Weblogs (blogs). A blog is distinct from other forms of electronic documentation in that it functions as a public, electronic diary, consisting of short, frequently-updated personal reflections and reports of activity. A typical blog is composed of daily entries of no more than a paragraph. Blogs are often accompanied by and supplemented with image galleries, curricula vitae, and archives of past postings. Blogs are also subject to trends: for example, many blogs in December include Christmas wish lists. Like e-mail and unlike other traditional forms of publication, blogs often include a comments feature which allows the reader to engage in discussion with the blog's writer and other readers by directly attaching a posting to the daily or topical entry. Although this approach to Web site design has been widely adopted by technophiles under the age of thirty, it also holds promise as a mechanism for a conversational form of knowledge development that previous technologies have not readily facilitated. This paper outlines the potential expansion of the blog as a venue for professional and philosophical discussion by the visual communication design community and other similar professional groups.

Radzikowska, Milena. University of Alberta (2003). Articles>Writing>Online>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

Corporate Blogging and the Technical Writer  

Corporate blogging is rapidly becoming another way for companies to communicate with their customers and increase internal communication. Learn about the advantages and future of blogging and how to get started.

Johnson, Tom H. Intercom (2006). Articles>Business Communication>Writing>Blogging

Culture Clash: Journalism and the Communal Ethos of the Blogosphere

In taking the costs of publishing to their near vanishing point, blogging represents one of the most democratic media or media formats in history. As such, traditional print journalism’s natural response has been to embrace the form, encourage it, proliferate it, and to use blogs to fulfill journalism’s mission of informing an electorate and, therefore, bettering democracy. Not quite.

Carroll, Brian. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Communication>Journalism>Blogging

Dangers of Personal Blogging

Bloggers who recklessly gush all types of personal details in their blogs may regret it. Stalkers, child predators, identity theft criminals, fanatics, and others are seeking photos and names of children, home addresses, home phone numbers, etc. Learn about the Dark Side of blogging and be smart.

Streight, Steven. Blogger.com (2005). Articles>Writing>Security>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

The Digital Debate: Should CEOs Blog?

A debate continues to rage about how important and influential media such as blogs, podcasts and social networking sites really are. At the heart of this debate is the question, Is the blogosphere really an appropriate place for executives and others in positions of power who have everything to lose?

Cody, Steve. Communication World Bulletin (2007). Articles>Management>Business Communication>Blogging

Does Having a Blog Make You a Writer?  

For the techno-savvy TechRepublic member, writing in some form or fashion is an almost daily occurrence. But how effective is your communication? In this interview, author Barry Rosenberg shares his thoughts about the current state of technical writing skills.

Kaelin, Mark. TechRepublic (2005). Articles>Interviews>Technical Writing>Blogging

Edelman's Perfect (Blog) Storm

In early March, The New York Times ran a story with the headline "Wal-Mart enlists bloggers in PR campaign." While the story itself is of interest as an example of how some PR agencies increasingly see blogs as legitimate communication channels, it is of greater interest to look at what the Edelman PR agency did in this specific case acting on behalf of their client—what went right and, more important, what didn't.

Hobson, Neville. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Business Communication>Blogging>Case Studies

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

Formation of Norms in a Blog Community

Blogs are often situated within a blog community of similar interests. These communities can be a useful way for readers to access a specific slice of information.

Wei, Carolyn. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Rhetoric>Online>Blogging

General Motors vs. The New York Times: A Case Study in Effective Blogging

For all the talk about corporate blogs, there still seems to be considerable debate about their value. As of early June, though, those questions should have been put to rest. General Motors illustrated just one of the benefits of blogs—bypassing the media and taking your message directly to the public—in its response to a column that appeared in The New York Times.

Holtz, Shel. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Business Communication>Public Relations>Blogging

Geography of the Blogosphere: Representing the Culture, Ecology and Community of Weblogs

Maps of any aspect of the Internet call for different approaches than traditional cartography for two reasons. First, any attempt to map the Internet using the Internet as a medium changes the thing it sets out to represent. Second, Internet maps are more than pictures of static—or at least relatively slow moving—features but are representations of ever changing systems of relationships. The blogosphere is an example of explosive growth in the number and complexity of interrelationship and community made possible by the Internet.

Packwood, Nicholas. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Writing>Environmental>Blogging