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

A classification of blogs following Herring 29
helpful for the compensation of power discrepancies between corporate bloggers
and their readers.
M2: Message transmission
Blogs use, as per Herring’s definition, one-way transmission, meaning that readers
have no indication that a blog entry is being written while the blogger is
composing it. Furthermore, readers have no information at all on the time of
writing – the time stamp provided in a blog entry does not indicate coding time
(CT), but publication time (PT). This allows bloggers to plan, revise, edit and
control the timing of their contribution. 3
M3: Persistence of transcript
Persistence of transcript is another factor postulated by Herring whose salience
can be called into question when considering current technology trends. Textbased
chat systems come to mind when integrating this facet, but even such
systems increasingly allow the logging of chats on the client side. 4 Since the
primary motive behind retaining only a current message buffer and ’throwing
out’ older messages has in the past been to conserve storage space, it can be
assumed that in the near future virtually all digital communication will become
permanent, since storage prices over the past decades have plummeted dramatically.
That this affects not only private end-users, but on a much larger scale
also computing companies, is reflected by the ever-growing disk space offerings
of web-based email providers such as Google Mail and Yahoo! Mail. The advent
of distributed data storage and cloud computing means that companies
that handle huge amounts of user data have no real reason to ever delete it,
as very little cost is associated with keeping it and conversely a profit is to be
made by applying text mining technology to its analysis. Thus whether or not
a CMC message is permanent or not is a question of semantics – to the user it
may or may not seem permanent, but this says little about whether it is stored
somewhere or not. Blogs are and essentially always have been permanent, a fact
reflected by common blog terminology: a post is stored under a web address
referred to as the permalink.
M4: Size of message buffer
The size of the message buffer is another factor that can be expected to drop
in significance rapidly. Currently it is most relevant in mobile text messaging
(SMS), though not so much due to genuinely technical constraints, but primarily
to allow service providers to charge a nominal fee per message. Size restrictions
in other contexts (e.g. shout messages left on the “wall” of user profiles in
services like Last.fm and Facebook) have a tendency to be loosened or removed
3 This becomes significant when taking into account the Gricean maxim of making conversational
contributions when they are most appropriate. See section 2.17.
4 Cf. the Pidgin instant messaging client which allows logging all chat sessions as text files.
From a purely technical perspective logging keystrokes on a computer in any context is easily
accomplished and since textual data takes up virtually no storage space in the era of cheap
giga- or even terabyte hard drives, it can justifiably be assumed that in the future all digital
data will be stored permanently.