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

A classification of blogs following Herring 27
M2 Message transmission
M3 Persistence
transcript
of
M4 Size
buffer
of message
M5 Channels of communication
M6 Anonymous messaging
One-way. Readers have no indication that a
message is being composed while the blogger is
writing it
Persistent. Blog entries are permanently stored
on the Web
Unlimited. Like most web-based formats and
in contrast to mobile applications, the message
buffer is effectively unlimited in size
Hypertext. Conventional blogs 2 are based on
HTML and therefore primarily visual, but a variety
of media can be embedded via scripting
languages
Pseudonymity. Blogs are frequently written under
a pseudonym, but this seems less common
than in other forms of CMC (e.g. IRC, online
message boards)
M7 Private messaging No private messaging. All blog-based communication
is public; private messaging can only
be carried out by switching to another type of
communication such as email
M8 Filtering Special (see comment)
M9 Quoting Prevalent. Both quoting and linking to other
blogs is a frequent practice in blogs
M10 Message format Special (see comment). sequential format, presentation
can be determined by reader (RSS),
annotated with meta-data
Table 2.1: Medium factors of blogs according to Herring (2007)
M1: Synchronicity
While blogs can generally be described as asynchronous, synchronicity in CMC
appears to be evolving from a binary distinction to a scalar variable. So-called
microblogging formats (Java et al., 2007) allow users to broadcast short messages,
often reporting on their current activities (the tag line used on the Twitter
website is “What are you doing?”). The success of these formats has been
driven significantly by the proliferation of mobile connectivity. Users can post
on Twitter via their cell phones, pagers and other mobile devices, making them
independent of desktop (or even laptop) computers, which in addition to being
less portable take relatively long to start up and cannot be comfortably used in
any given environment.
Although Herring states that “asynchronous systems do not require that
users be logged on at the same time in order to send and receive messages; rather,
messages are stored at the addressee’s site until they can be read” (2007, no
pagination), this distinction is also shifting in several ways. Firstly, a growing
2 By this I mean blogs which are (hyper)text-based, as opposed to video blogging and
podcasting. A broader definition of blogging subsumes under the term any activity that
involves a person publishing digital information in a sequential format.