Studies, Survey, Research, Polls

This will take some time, but I'd like to collect here the most important studies on blogging and bloggers of the last years.

There's a preprint of the BROG's (= The (We)blog Research on Genre Project ) newest paper "Language Networks on Live Journal". The paper will be presented at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), January 3-6, 2007.

Research of Bloggers (PEW Internet and American Life Project):
Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers from 7/19/2006 by Amanda Lenhart and Susannah Fox.

Short summary:
A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology. Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression – documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family.

The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging: On Language, Culture, and Power in Persian Weblogestan, by Alireza Doostdar. Keywords: Iran, Weblogs, Computer Mediated Communication, speech genres, social status.

There's a poll by Gallup which says: Blogs Are Not Yet in the Media Big Leagues, and very few Americans read them with any frequency. Lydia Saad writes (March 2005): "The apparent effect that blogging is having within media and political circles is far ahead of its direct impact on the American public. Relatively few Americans are generally familiar with the phenomenon, and fewer still are reading blogs with any frequency. Even among the most blog-conscious demographic -- 18- to 29-year-olds -- frequent blog reading is the exception."

Viégas, F. B. (2005). Bloggers' expectations of privacy and accountability: An initial survey. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10, 3,12

Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis From the Bottom Up", Scheidt et al, 2005

Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs, by Herring, Kouper, Scheidt, Wright 2004

Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs, by Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, Wright

The Role of the Author in Topical Blogs, by Scott Carter

PerseusBlogSurvey

Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community, by A. Blanchard

Buzz,Blogs and Beyond: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004, Michael Cornfield, Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Efimova, L. (2004), Discovering the Iceberg of Knowledge Work. In Proc. of the
Fifth European Conference on Organisational Knowledge, Learning, and
Capabilities (OKLC 2004), Innsbruck.

Erickson, T., Halverson, C., Kellogg, W. A., Laff, M. and Wolf, T. (2002), Social
Translucence: Designing Social Infrastructures that Make Collective
Activity Visible, Communications of the ACM, 45(4): 40-44.

An Argumentation Analysis of Weblogs
Harrison, T. M. and Stephen, T. (1992), On-Line Disciplines: Computer-Mediated
Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Computers and the
Humanities, 26: 181-193.

Jenkins, E. (2003), Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story In Microdoc News: Online
Magazine about Exercising Personal Power in the Information Age, May
20.

Visual Blogs, by Meredith Badger, 2004: Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs.

Marcoccia, M. (2004), On-Line Polylogues: Conversation Structure and
Participation Framework in Internet Newsgroups, Journal of Pragmatics,
36: 115-145.

Mortensen, T. and Walker, J. (2002), Blogging thoughts: personal publication as
an online research tool. In Researching ICTs in Context (Ed, Morrison, A.),
Intermedia, Oslo.

Röll, M. (2003), Business Weblogs: A Pragmatic Approach to Introducing
Weblogs in Medium and Large Enterprises. In BlogTalk: A European
Conference on Weblogs, Vienna, May 23-24.