blogging and microblogging in the social world

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What is a blog?

A blog, or weblog is a type of website that contains regularly updated web pages that provide commentary, links, descriptions of events, and video or other visual media.  Blogs usually have archives and are often interactive, having a comments feature that allows readers to respond to posts.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project report, The State of Blogging (Pew Internet, 2005) found that bloggers are more likely to be:

• Men: 57% are male
• Young: 48% are under age 30
• Broadband users: 70% have broadband at home
• Internet veterans: 82% have been online for six years or more
• Relatively well off financially: 42% live in households earning over $50,000
• Well educated: 39% have college or graduate degrees

A few things to consider when thinking about these statistics:

• The majority of bloggers are young, affluent, tech savvy men, which may be problematic in that it limits the voices being heard through blogs.
• Men have proven to be earlier adopters of technology but women do catch up in their use of technology.
• Male bloggers are perceived as more credible by information seekers on the Internet (Armstrong & McAdams, 2009).

In 2008, Pew took another look at blogging and found that:

• 12% of internet users (representing 9% of all adults) say they ever create or work on their own online journal or blog.
• 33% of internet users (the equivalent of 24% of all adults) say they read blogs, with 11% of internet users doing so on a typical day (this number is up from 27% percent in the 2005 report)

Why do people blog?

• at least initially, Rebecca Blood explains, web logs were primarily about links, though the ease of use provided by Blogger, whose interface “was so simple that many [bloggers] began posting linkless entries about whatever came to mind,” rather quickly downgraded the importance of the links
• at the most basic level, people use blogs to express themselves: most blogs fall under the broad rubric of “life writing,” although, as both Kavita Hayton and Bonnie Nardi et al. suggest, a blog is not a diary, and many bloggers keep a separate diary
• to meet and/or develop a community of like-minded (or interest-sharing) people, like Sean here, one of my buddies from college who moved to Australia after graduation and ended up becoming part of the music scene there through his blog
• as Miura and Yamashita note, the use of comments and “TrackBack” greatly help to build a sense of community between a blogger and her or his audience and fellow bloggers
• so-called “mommy-blogs” are also a fixture, and to a lesser extent, “daddy” blogs—ironically so since studies such as that of Sarah Pedersen and Caroline Macafee have indicated that while women are roughly as likely to blog and more likely to stick with it, most of the renowned blogs are written by men
• or maybe not so ironically so, since it may have something to with the perception bias noted by Cory Armstrong and Melinda McAdams, which indicates that people who are actively “information seeking” tend to view male-authored blogs as more credible
• Michael Stefanone and Derek Lackaff suggest that many young people blog to receive validation, if not fame and fortune, by joining the reality TV fueled “culture of personal self-disclosure“
• people can also use blogs to further their careers—by using their blog as a job search tool, say, or giving career advice to others—or even to escape a seemingly dead end career
• and last, but not least, people can use blogs to make money
• which, of course, ought to remind us that, although blogs tend to have a strong personal voice, corporations have blogs, too—here’s the VP of McDonald’s, for example, asking us where the spirit of Woodstock has gone!
• and, as Jan Schmidt notes, some blogs are simply there for search engine optimization purposes

“The founding mother of the blog revolution, Movable Type’s Mena Trott, talks about the early days of blogging, when she realized that giving regular people the power to share our lives online is the key to building a friendlier, more connected world.”

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mena_trott_tours_her_blog_world.html