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

Chapter 2
Formal, technical and
pragmatic aspects of
blogging
2.1 Proposing a hierarchy of community, purpose
and text
Although still a relatively young phenomenon, blogs have attracted a notable
degree of interest in academic research in the course of the last few years. Particularly
their impact on politics and journalism and their role in the wider
context of social media have brought blogs into the spotlight, an unlikely transformation
considering their early status as either link lists or personal journals
(Blood, 2000, 2002). Research has examined the role of blogs in political campaigns
(Williams et al., 2005; Trammell, 2006) and political discussion (Adamic
and Glance, 2005; Kerbel and Bloom, 2005), relationship management (Stefanone
and Jang, 2007) and science (Wilkins, 2008), in the contexts of e-learning
(Williams and Jacobs, 2004; Richardson, 2006) and organizational communication
(Charman, 2006; Kelleher and Miller, 2006) as well as in many other areas.
Specific blogging practices have also been examined, such as linking, quoting
and commenting and their relation to networks (Efimova and de Moor, 2005;
Ali-Hasan and Adamic, 2007; Adamic and Glance, 2005). Another approach to
blogs is less interested in blog content or style as such, than in their use as a
data source. Large-scale computational approaches have explored correlation
of linguistic features with age and gender (Argamon et al., 2007; Schler et al.,
2006), author personality (Nowson et al., 2005; Oberlander and Nowson, 2006)
and mood (Mishne, 2005). Yet, while much effort has been invested in descriptions
of blogs, accounts more geared towards explanation (i.e. attempting to
answer the question “Why are blogs written in the way they are written?”) are
rare.
How can we better understand blogs as a form of online communication?
While previous studies of blogging have established criteria for the categorization
of blogs according to their form and content, suggesting categories such
as filter blog (Blood, 2002; Herring et al., 2005) and campaign blog (Trammell,
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