The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer ... - Oapen

Methods, data and approach 15
proliferation of audio and video content), it is likely that the term will become
even more generic – a one-size-fits-all label for “personal serial publishing”. A
2008 report by the blog search engine company Technorati echoes this development:
But as the Blogosphere grows in size and influence, the lines between
what is a blog and what is a mainstream media site become less clear.
Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites
and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the
Blogosphere. White and Winn (2009)
This is also reflected by other, generally technical definitions common in
CMC research, such as that favored by Susan Herring (“frequently modified webpages
containing individual entries displayed in reverse chronological sequence”
(Herring et al., 2004a, no pagination)), though her description crucially omits
the serial nature of blogs. Seriality, global audience scope and availability to private
individuals with no institutional backing are the features that characterize
blogs independently of other criteria.
While the simple working definition of a corporate blog as a (primarily textual)
blog used in an institutional context to further organizational goals is sufficient
at this point, I will return to the question of how users conceptualize
blogs at a later point (see chapter 2). The object of my research has been
English-language corporate blogs, the majority of them maintained by major
U.S. companies (described in the following section), and their linguistic form
and pragmatic function as an emerging discourse genre.
1.3 Methods, data and approach
As this thesis examines the form and function of a new kind of institutionalpublic
communication on the Internet, it was only plausible to base it on naturally
occurring evidence. Consequently, I assembled a linguistic corpus to meet
that need. The Corporate Blogging Corpus (CBC/Corporati) is a collection of
blog entries that was assembled between September 2006 and September 2007,
with individual sources added at later points in time. 7 The corpus was compiled
by use of a web-based application (Corporati) written in PHP and using
a MySQL relational database. Corporati made use of the semantic structuring
of blog data, specifically of Web feeds based on the RSS and Atom protocols to
automatically harvest entries from a fixed list of 137 company blogs that was
in turn manually compiled, tagged and analyzed (see appendix A.1). Table 1.1
shows the core statistics that were calculated for CBC/Corporati based on the
data that was retrieved from the selection of corporate blogs.
CBC/Corporati consisted of a tool for collecting, aggregating and tagging
the language data and of facilities for the visualization and exporting of statistics
derived from it. Although such a corpus is a promising basis for a microlinguistic,
purely descriptive study of a text type, I came to realize that such a study
was too specific before any theoretical model of blogs, corporate blogs and their
respective communicative functions had been established.
7 The corpus is in the public domain and available for download and re-use at
http://ynada.com/cbc-corporati.