The Greater Blogging Community
Christine Carl of Georgetown University's Communication, Culture and Technology Program did her thesis on Bloggers and Their Blogs: A Depiction of the Users and Usage of Weblogs on the World Wide Web.
The abstract of her thesis states the following:
"As the Internet and World Wide Web are permanently adopted into the world's cultural and commercial fabric, users discover new and different ways the Web can be employed to create social and community spaces that were not possible before the Internet’s introduction. The weblog provides one of these new forums for communication. Loosely defined, a weblog or a blog is a non-commercial webpage regularly updated through the use of a blogging software which allows the user to "publish" journal entries, news, links, creative writings, and other amalgamations of text and graphics to the page in a sequential, dated list of entries referred to as posts. Through the World Wide Web, blogs allow users who otherwise lack sufficient knowledge in web design and development to manage and supply original content to the web.
The implementation of reactive communication on many blogs leads one to assume that the vast majority of "bloggers" want the content they provide to be read by others. With thousands of weblogs being created within the last two years, bloggers are finding ways to attract and retain visitors to their sites. This thesis argues that to facilitate the exchange of blogged content, a new type of online community has developed. Some bloggers do not wish to fully participate in the activities of the community, and some bloggers do not want their websites to be accessible to the public through promotion. This thesis proposes that the bloggers who actively engage in reactive forms of communication via their weblogs are members of a greater blogging community or "blogosphere," imbued with a collective sense of social responsibility, common purpose, and integrity as functions of community.
Blogging software and online services have the potential to dramatically increase the percentage of non-technically oriented web users administering unique, individual webpages on the Internet. This paper will present and discuss demographical information about bloggers. These data will be pulled from a self-selective online survey of bloggers. The demographics will be compared with the Internet-usage portion of the 2001 United States Supplemental Census to see how the American blogging population compares with the overall distribution of American Internet users.
The data collected will also be used to consider the blogging population. Who is blogging, and how are bloggers using these virtual spaces? Is one demographic more likely to participate in blogging than another? Does membership in any major demographic such as age, level of education, or race, predict the possible types of content found on blogs and the ways their owners chose to share them with others, if at all? Weblogs, as will be discussed, are rapidly becoming one of the most recognizable applications on the World Wide Web. Understanding how blogs are being used is important in the consideration of their impact on the Internet and the world at large." (Emphasises mine).
The full text of Christine Carl's thesis is accessable through this link.
Christine Carl of Georgetown University's Communication, Culture and Technology Program did her thesis on Bloggers and Their Blogs: A Depiction of the Users and Usage of Weblogs on the World Wide Web.
The abstract of her thesis states the following:
"As the Internet and World Wide Web are permanently adopted into the world's cultural and commercial fabric, users discover new and different ways the Web can be employed to create social and community spaces that were not possible before the Internet’s introduction. The weblog provides one of these new forums for communication. Loosely defined, a weblog or a blog is a non-commercial webpage regularly updated through the use of a blogging software which allows the user to "publish" journal entries, news, links, creative writings, and other amalgamations of text and graphics to the page in a sequential, dated list of entries referred to as posts. Through the World Wide Web, blogs allow users who otherwise lack sufficient knowledge in web design and development to manage and supply original content to the web.
The implementation of reactive communication on many blogs leads one to assume that the vast majority of "bloggers" want the content they provide to be read by others. With thousands of weblogs being created within the last two years, bloggers are finding ways to attract and retain visitors to their sites. This thesis argues that to facilitate the exchange of blogged content, a new type of online community has developed. Some bloggers do not wish to fully participate in the activities of the community, and some bloggers do not want their websites to be accessible to the public through promotion. This thesis proposes that the bloggers who actively engage in reactive forms of communication via their weblogs are members of a greater blogging community or "blogosphere," imbued with a collective sense of social responsibility, common purpose, and integrity as functions of community.
Blogging software and online services have the potential to dramatically increase the percentage of non-technically oriented web users administering unique, individual webpages on the Internet. This paper will present and discuss demographical information about bloggers. These data will be pulled from a self-selective online survey of bloggers. The demographics will be compared with the Internet-usage portion of the 2001 United States Supplemental Census to see how the American blogging population compares with the overall distribution of American Internet users.
The data collected will also be used to consider the blogging population. Who is blogging, and how are bloggers using these virtual spaces? Is one demographic more likely to participate in blogging than another? Does membership in any major demographic such as age, level of education, or race, predict the possible types of content found on blogs and the ways their owners chose to share them with others, if at all? Weblogs, as will be discussed, are rapidly becoming one of the most recognizable applications on the World Wide Web. Understanding how blogs are being used is important in the consideration of their impact on the Internet and the world at large." (Emphasises mine).
The full text of Christine Carl's thesis is accessable through this link.
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