Blogging

Bloggers’ Blogs: Exploring The Definition of a Medium

Blogs have attracted the attention of mainstream media, young people, academic researchers, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but only a small portion of Internet users read blogs, and many don’t even know what the term means. Reports on the number of people reading blogs vary (Rainey 2005, comScore 2005), but even in the United States, less than 50% of Internet users read blogs, and many do not even know when they are reading them. Are (Buchwalter 2005).

Many tools have been developed to support blogging, and people have extended these tools to perform a variety of tasks that may or may not be considered blogging. The term has been used to promote a new phenomenon, but people are not always clear about what it means. Blogging is not a self-explanatory term, so blog, blogger and blog have been conceptualized in contradictory and ambiguous ways by both the press and academics. The purpose of this article is to highlight and analyze the various uses of the term, highlighting how relevant social groups interact with each other and bring bias into blogs and blog analysis. Rather than claiming a final definition, the article invites scholars to conceptualize blogs as a set of diverse practices that generate diverse content on the medium we call blogs.

The article begins by examining how tool developers, media, researchers, and practitioners have conceptualized the blog. Blogs are often seen as a genre of computer-mediated communication that can be evaluated in terms of content and structure. Stylistic variations are considered sub-genres. These sub-genres are usually developed by drawing parallels with existing text production genres such as diary and journalism. Viewing blogs as a genre obscures the effectiveness of the practices and the actions of practitioners. Using metaphors to capture subgenres raises questions about how to evaluate blogs.

In the second part of this article, we offer a framework for understanding blogs as a diverse set of practices that lead to the production of diverse content that we call blogs. In this section, we argue that we need to move away from a content-oriented approach and conceptualize the blog as a medium and by-product of expression. This shift allows us to view blogs in relation to culture and practice. Furthermore, it provides a framework for understanding how blogs have blurred the boundaries between the oral and the written, the physical and the spatial, the public and the private. The study of blogs should be based on the practice of blogging, not just on the analysis of results. Reconceptualizing the blog as a medium and by-product of practice allows us to understand different intentions that produce different outcomes, and allows us to analyze blogs, even if The style and content of the results themselves may not match.

Reflexive Methodology

This article is based on an ethnographic study of blogging that included participant observation for 20 months and formal and informal interviews for 9 months. Over the course of 9 months of interviews, I had hundreds of informal conversations with a variety of bloggers, including early adopters and newcomers, college students and working moms, people who blog professionally, and people who blog in their spare time. Were included. Most of my discussions took place in major metropolitan areas of the United States or via email and instant messaging.

I read a diverse collection of blogs to understand the range of posts associated with the term blog. I discovered a variety of blogs using tools like Technorati, Bloggers Next Blog, Zanga, and LiveJournal’s recently updated features. Although I found a number of non-English blogs, I only read English blogs to find content.

Through a combination of snowballing, public advertisements on Craigslist, and unsolicited emails to randomly selected bloggers, I selected 16 bloggers who represented the diverse practices I observed and heard during informal discussions and daily blog surfing. Was. I interviewed each of them in detail in a formal recording environment. Of the 16 selected, 8 identified themselves as male, 6 as female and 2 as transgender. Their ages ranged from 19 to 57, with the average age being 29.4. All lived in metropolitan areas, 9 on the West Coast of the US, 4 on the East Coast, and 3 in the London area. All but one blogged in English. Twelve identified themselves as White, 3 as Asian American, and 1 as Latino. My understanding of blogging practices is limited by the lack of representation of rural areas, non-English speakers, people of color, and non-Western cultures, but this article does not attempt to give a definitive account of all blogging practices. The diversity of practices found among my relatively homogeneous subject population nevertheless indicates a range of experiences and perspectives.

I was interested in blogging long before I studied it. I created a blog in 1997 and have contributed to and consulted on the development of blog-related tools, especially Blogger. My position as an insider gives me better access to data about bloggers and blogs, and although this perspective limits my neutrality, I still allow my analysis to be influenced by my personal views or the views of my employer. Being careful not to.

Formal Definitions

Various parties, including experts, technology companies, academics, and mainstream media, have attempted to define blogs and blogging. According to Wikipedia, Jörn Berger coined the term weblog in December 1997, and Peter Mehlholz “split the term weblog into the phrase ‘we blog'” and coined the term “blog” on his website in April or May 1999 (Wikipedia 2005). Both terms were developed to identify websites that have a particular look and feel that is distinct from the home page. An early blogging tool, Blogger, was introduced by Pyra Labs in 1999 to make it easier for people to create blogs. Due to its popularity the term spread across the web and solidified the look and feel of blogs. Following the example of Blogger, other tools supporting blogging have been developed. Many have added additional features (such as comments), but mimic Blogger’s layout and general style. Other services like LiveJournal and Diaryland are not based on Blogger’s model and were not originally designed as blogging tools, so users don’t think of what they do as blogging.

The clearest definitions of blogging come from companies that have developed tools to support blogging. These definitions are designed as a marketing pitch, intended to explain why people should try the service and therefore what practices it includes. Upon its launch in October 1999, Blogger described its product as an “automated weblog publishing tool” and assumed that users already had knowledge of weblogging. Six months later, the slogan became “Push Button Publishing” and the description of the tool changed to “Blogger enables instant communication by allowing you to publish your thoughts on the Web whenever you want.”

LiveJournal was designed with journaling in mind, and its evolved definition of “Live Journal” shows how LiveJournal became a blogging tool:
…an up-to-date log of what you did and when. (October 1999)
…an online journal that can be updated several times a day with short entries or several times a week with longer entries… (March 2000)
…an easy-to-use (yet very powerful and customizable) personal publishing (“blog”) tool based on open source software. (November 2004)

TypePad, a new blog hosting service, uses familiar self-promotion techniques to promote its tools, describing itself as “a powerful hosted weblog service that lets users share travel reports, diaries, digital scrapbooks, and more.” Provides the most comprehensive set of features to instantly share and publish on the web” (November 2004). Or Zanga defines itself as “an online diary and journal community”, but uses the slogan “weblog community” (November 2004). To attract users to adopt the new habit, blogging companies constantly rely on the familiarity of the term, linking it to familiar forms of content production such as publications, magazines and diaries or logs of one’s own activities.

In March 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary added blog (both noun and verb) and weblog to its corpus, using various definition references. His definition of a blog is: “A blog contains daily musings about news, dating, marriage, divorce, kids, Middle Eastern politics and a million other things, or nothing at all.” And “Blogging means being part of a community of smart, technically skilled people who want to be at the forefront of new literary endeavors” (OED 2003). They define the verb as “writing or maintaining a blog”. You can also read or browse specialized weblogs. Habitually”, a weblog is “a frequently updated website containing personal observations, excerpts from other sources, etc., usually maintained by a single person, and usually containing hyperlinks to other websites. An online journal or diary” (OED 2003). Other dictionaries have also added the term. In 2004, blog (“a website containing a personal online diary of reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the author”) was the most requested entry in the Miriam Webster dictionary (Miriam Webster 2005).

In addition to dictionaries, subject encyclopedias were also searched for definitions of blogs. Jill Walker used blogs to collect feedback when defining weblogs for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (Walker 2003). In doing so, they turned the definition into a collaborative project, developing it in a way that included people who were involved in creating what they had defined. The definition mainly focuses on content and structure. The formal definition presents the blog as a genre that can be characterized by structure and divided by content type. Structural inconsistencies are analyzed as deviations from the standard prototype, while original variations are considered representative of subgenres. While content produced through blogs can logically be categorized into genres, defining blogs as genres obscures their role of transmitting and displaying expression.

Definitions By Researchers

When researchers began analyzing blogs and publishing articles on the topic, each researcher defined the term at the beginning of their study. This suggests that there is no uniform definition among researchers. Researchers consistently rely on the same types of structural definitions that are proposed in technical and dictionary definitions. For example, a blog is “a frequently updated web page containing a series of archived posts, usually in reverse chronological order” (Nardi et al. 2004: 1) and “a modified web page that Lists dated entries in reverse chronological order” (Herring et al. 2004: 1). These definitions also determine the objectives of the research. Herring et al. In the article. They argue that “blogs are the newest form of Internet communication” (2004: 1). They present blogs in a form that can be analyzed temporally (e.g., frequency of posting) and structurally (tools used, word count of posts, number of links, presence or absence of features such as calendars). May go. They also consider the purpose of the blog based on the perceived intent evident from the content. This approach provides metrics for measuring blogs, but says little about the phenomenon itself and why the differences in blogging practice are so large.

Other researchers have explored this practice, but blogs are usually compared to other practices that have given rise to literary genres. Consider the title of a recently published academic paper: “Blogging as a social activity, or getting 900 million people to read your diary?” (Nardi et al. 2004). Although the work contains excellent ethnographic material, the title invites readers to consider blogs equivalent to diaries and evaluate them according to the same criteria. This introduces an evaluative nature into the study, blurring the distinction between practices. By asking questions that elicit a response of “not at all”, the authors suggest that blogging deviates from acceptable social norms. In other words, bloggers are either naive or crazy. By framing the essay this way, the author ignores the cultural values of bloggers and misleads readers into thinking that blogging means having 900 million people read your digital diary. This approach limits researchers’ ability to understand blogging.

Metaphors are valuable linguistic tools for introducing new concepts, but relying too heavily on them distorts the concepts being presented. Through metaphors, people cognitively incorporate the properties of an old concept into a new concept. Metaphors work when two concepts have many properties in common; However, it is their differences that distinguish the concepts from each other. Evaluating a new concept against an old concept obscures the distinction between practices in the minds of practitioners. It also obscures any differences that may have arisen in the context of production, as researchers would have to apply different results to the old concept. By evaluating blogs according to diaries rather than blogging words, Nardi et al. Blogging as a concept makes no sense.

Metaphors are often used when defining a blog. From services to media, from bloggers to researchers, people consistently define blogs as diaries or journals, journalism, bookmarks or notes. This may be useful for introducing the concept to novices, but is difficult to both evaluate and identify. People are more likely to insert new information into their initial model than to reevaluate the original model and identify differences (Aronson 1995). By using metaphors as evaluation schemes, researchers create inflexible models, invoke biased frameworks, and limit their ability to conduct meaningful analyses.

Mass Media Definitions

Academic publications are not known for sensationalist headlines, but mainstream media are. Therefore, it is not surprising that their coverage of blogs includes problematic titles. The most serious misuse of the definition by metaphor occurred during coverage of the 2004 US presidential election. After bloggers were given press passes to the Democratic National Convention, The New York Times ran the headline: “Bloggers: Bloggers of The New York Times” (Lee 2004). Although the diary metaphor helps novice bloggers understand, The New York Times began reporting on blogs in 2000 (Gallagher 2000), and often uses the term blog in headlines without the diarist metaphor. Furthermore, The New York Times relied on many tropes in its coverage of blogs, including amateur journalism. The New York Times exposed its bias in this article by choosing the diary metaphor instead of journalism. The title suggests that readers should evaluate the new members of the press corps as diarists, not as amateur journalists or mere bloggers. Like the academic title, the title is also critical and suggests that bloggers are not worthy of being called journalists.

The relationship between bloggers and journalists is complex. On the one hand, journalists are intimidated by bloggers’ ability to quickly report new content. On the other hand, they reject bloggers’ neutrality and lack of source checking. Most bloggers do not consider themselves journalists, but some do. Bloggers who call themselves journalists consider their work as journalism and their blog as a journalistic publication. They are actively involved in setting ethical codes and standards, but do not consider the codes set by many mainstream media organizations as essential to their practice. He believes that given his identity and activities, he should be given legal journalistic protection. In Apple v. Does (EFF 2005), bloggers believe they should have journalistic rights to protect their sources. The case is about whether bloggers can be journalists and whether journalists can use blogs as a means of production. The rise of journalistic bloggers highlights the separation of practice and media. Not all blogs are journalism, but the same is true for newspapers, radio and television. Journalists can write articles for any of these traditional media, but can they also write articles for blogs? That is, is blogging a genre like news, or a medium like television?

Definitions By Physicians

To truly understand what blogging is, it is important to reach out to practitioners, not just those who evaluate the practice. When bloggers explain blogging to beginners, they also use metaphors, often the same metaphors used by people studying formal definitions. But he also recognizes the limitations of these metaphors. When we asked bloggers to define blogging, many used metaphors, but quickly tried to qualify the metaphors to explain the difference. For example, we often hear statements like, “It’s like my online diary, but…” When outsiders or the media try to categorize their practice, bloggers often avoid metaphors and describe their blogs. Express their opposition to internal comparisons. This rejection of metaphors occurs when outsiders try to judge the blog based on these metaphors. As blogging becomes more internalized, bloggers are less able to use metaphors, which become a hindrance rather than a cognitive support.

Practitioners often go beyond metaphors and structural definitions to point out blogging and the social aspects of blogging. They talk about the interactive nature of blogging and the desire to share with others. They talk about community and how blogging helps you participate in a community of people. Few definitions take into account the social aspect of blogging, yet it remains essential to the practice of most bloggers.

Experienced bloggers often find the problem of definition frustrating or redundant. For every blog post that attempts to define blogging, there are an equal number of posts that reject the attempt. This rejection stems from the frustration of being classified and placed into narrow categories. Very angrily, a 6-year veteran said:

I have left aside the question of definition in favor of these repetitions. A blog is what we do when we say “we blog”, and I don’t really think about what the blog is, a diary or something else, a link log or a photo blog, etc. I don’t think these are particularly meaningful categories. …It’s a blog because bloggers do it. It is a blog because it contains blogging practices. It is a blog because it is created using blogging tools. It is a blog because it is made of blog widgets. It’s a blog because bloggers are obsessed with it and everyone points to it and says “It’s a blog!” -Carl Carl has an internal model of blogs, bloggers, and blogs that differs from the metaphors used by novices and outsiders. Asking them to define a blog is like asking a Supreme Court judge to define hardcore pornography. One can only answer, “You’ll know it when you see it.”

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