April 22, 2005

Scott Carter: The Role of Author in Topical Blogs

Carter, Scott. 2005. The Role of Author in Topical Blogs. HCI 2005. Extended abstracts. Pages: 1256 - 1259.

Abstract:

Web logs, or blogs, challenge the notion of authorship. Seemingly, rather than a model in which the author’s writings are themselves a contribution, the blog author weaves a tapestry of links, quotations, and references amongst generated content. In this paper, I present a study of the role of the author plays in the construction of topical blogs, in particular focusing on how blog authors make decisions about what to post and how they judge the quality of posts. To this end, I analyzed the blogs and blogging habits of eight participants using a quantitative analysis tool that I developed, a diary study, and interviews with each participant. Results suggest that authors of topical blogs often do not but strive to create new content, often follow journalistic conventions, use the content of their blogs as a reference tool for other work practices, and are connected as a community by a set of source documents. Results also show that Instant Messaging is useful as an interview medium when questions center around online content.

Notes:

Method: quant analysis of posts, diary study, interviews
Restricted subjects to 8 US bloggers that concentrate on IP issues.

Findings: 1) authors of topical blogs often do not but strive to create new content, often follow journalistic conventions, use the content of their blogs as a reference tool for other work practices, and are connected as a community by a set of source documents; 2) that Instant Messaging (IM) is useful as an interview medium when questions center around online content.

The analysis tool that Carter reports on looks at data like word length, average external links, percent of post quoted, etc. Carter positions his data against Herring's.

Subjects defined a good post as one that "contributes new information or, to a lesser extent, extensive commentary about some issue on which the participant is an expert" (3). Some also thought timeliness mattered.
- Best to link to completely new information or at least source info (court decisions, laws).

"Participants reported judging the quality of a post primarily by trackbacks (links from other blogs to their post) or by their own analysis of server traffic. Another metric that most participants used was links from blogs with a much larger perceived audience than their own. Participants did not attribute much value to the size and quality of comments left on the blog" (3).

6 of the participants kept journalistic conventions when updating - marking changes with things like bold, colored text, etc. 2 modeled it after a wiki.

- blog is "reference archive" - connected to work (but also limited by); each other helps keep on top of new material
- concerns over voice (academic talk vs. layperson)
- everyone analyzed their traffic (many said that others didn't matter)

There is nothing shocking about this study, but it is a clean reminder of what is going on in topical blogosphere. Simple and well done. It is also an interesting encouragement to think about how to do a diary study with bloggers.

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April 9, 2005

Adam Reed: "My blog is me"

Reed, A. (forthcoming). 'My blog is me': texts and persons in UK online journal culture (and anthropology). Ethnos.

Meta-notes:

Reed is an anthropologist studying British "journal bloggers" who participate in a directory of British bloggers. He has studied them extensively and has one of the best understandings of blogging that i've seen. His essay reveals many of the complicated issues in blogging, including "my blog is me" / "I am not my blog" and how celebrity culture plays into blogging.

Notes:

Reed is inspired by the work of anthropologist Alfred Gell who offers a way for substituting objects for people so that the analysis can look like anthropology and be useful for anthropologists. His work is focused on art-objects and he offers for kinds of "subjects" that the analyst can use: 'index' (the object itself), 'artist', 'recipient', and 'prototype.' "Gell is interested in the way artefacts can organise sets of relations and gain significance as a consequence of the agency assigned to them" (2).

Reed argues that an anthropological analysis of texts (including blogging) should begin with Gell's premise. "As Gell argues with art-objects, I suggest that one might best start by considering the ways in which texts appear to extend the agency of persons" (2). Reed argues, along the lines of Annelise Riles, that blogging is a culture explicitly "centered on substituting texts for persons" (3). They are concerned with the relations amongst bloggers.

The blogs that Reed encounters are of the typical "journal" style, centered around narratives of the authors' life. "Those webloggers I eventually met treated their texts as straightforward indexes of self. Unlike novelists, who, I was told, only let bits of themselves appear in their stories, journal bloggers put themselves forward unreservedly. For them, there is no issue of representation; they commonly assert that 'my blog is me'" (3). The constant updating is part of what gives blogging life; everything is meant to be a work in progress. Blogs are meant to be 'of the moment'. Blogging is not an act of composition, but a brain dump of what the bloggers is thinking right now (3).

The process is cathartic because you can get out what you are thinking at the moment. You can let it go, release it from your brain, rant and vent (4-5). All of the energy spent releasing negativity helps the blogger cope with the everyday by exorcising the negative aspects of the day.

There is a tension between "my blog is me" and "I am not my weblog" which explicitly references the fact that the blog does not represent the individual in entirety (5).

Journal bloggers know that people are reading what they write; this motivates them to keep writing. Reed prefers to use the term 'recipient' (from Gell) rather than 'reader' because bloggers have problems with this concept because it's different than being 'read.' Bloggers that he speaks with talk about 'visitors' instead of 'readers' (6). Visitors have easy access, don't have to pay, can leave notes and otherwise move about cyberspace.

"Just like a private diary, a weblog is composed so a subject can view himself or herself in mediated form, exteriorised as text. Although it is known that other people visit the site, the blogger insists that he or she is the main recipient; the popular refrain among journal bloggers is 'I blog for me'" (6). A lot of what bloggers talk about is looking back and remembering. Reading backwards is a process of getting access to historical feelings. That said, no blogger wants to be the only visitor to their blog. "Repeatedly, journal bloggers told me that part of the pleasure of weblogging lay in the sensation of exposing oneself, through the text, to people one doesn't know (letting them 'gawp' at your life)" (7).

"Knowing that anonymous people were visiting the weblog made the act of posting entries seem more significant; journal bloggers felt they had licence to express themselves fully to others, but without the fear of being judged or the risk of damaging personal relations. However, most journal bloggers soon learn that strangers are not the only visitors to the text. At some point, they discover that some of their recipients are people they know—family, work colleagues and friends" (7). It's fine when friends at a distance read it - it's a way of keeping in touch... but when people you know and see regularly access it, it often obstructs self-expression. When one of Reed's subject's boyfriend found it, he needed to go back and edit to protect himself; his posting rules also changed. Many of his subjects talk about self-censoring. Journal bloggers often complain about how this changes the initial purpose of blogging for self.

Developments in blogging like having directories and posting about blogging have made it more of a community but also changed the tenor of posting. With commenting, there ended up being a network of 'me' instead of a single narrative (9). Bloggers are concerned about the self-referential turn in blogging.

There are a handful of famous bloggers ("A-list") who appear on most others' blogs in the form of posts, links, blog rolls. "The extent of their fame (these persons/texts seem to be indexed everywhere) can be a source of envy and irritation, but also of admiration" (10). Many want to have their name appear in the same way, to make themselves the focus of others. One concern about celebrity culture is that it makes people focus on how they might attract more recipients. People post frequently to appear on the recently updated list, to try to attract attention. While people talk about blogging for themselves, they pay a lot of attention to hit counts. The "A-List" complain about the celebrity culture, citing that their fame is unsolicited and not always welcome; they talk about feeling coerced by the attention and of feeling too much pressure (11).

This has been complicated by the fact that many of these bloggers meet offline. One of the problems with the offline meeting is that people have these odd mediated relationships ahead of time. "It wasn’t that we didn’t know each other, it was that we did" (11). The blogmeets strengthen the relationships and motivation to keep blogging. "For them, these offline gatherings demonstrate that texts can improve the relations between persons, but also that persons can improve the relations between texts... Even more than before, reading the digital text feels like visiting a person you know" (12).

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March 9, 2005

Goffman and Post applied to blogging

Goffman, Erving. 1959. "Introduction" and "Performances" from The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday: New York.

Post, Robert. 2002. Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law. Duke University Press.

This entry is me applying these two pieces to four examples of blogging for my Performance Studies class. The voice is intended towards them and some of the talk was removed for privacy reasons.

Goffman

Blogging is often conceptualized as a form of textual production – metaphorically, diarying or journalism. Yet, i have found that many bloggers conceive of their practice as a presentation of self in digital life. Given this, Goffman can help us unpack what is going on in blogging. For the sake of focus, i am going to take it as a given that we all agree that a blog is not simply textual output, but identity production. A blog can be seen as a form of a body online and the text should be read as digitally-embodied performance where the constant stream of output alters the self and the presentation, adding new layers of skin that continually add to the representation.

I want to begin by explaining certain aspects of blogging, situated in Goffman's terms and approach. The blog itself is a 'face' where bloggers project a definition of the situation. In blogging, the blogger defines the stage of the performance as well as construct the performance itself. They create the site, define the terms for the audience, set the lights and determine the boundaries. The individual blogger has extensive influence over the definition of the situation (6). Given this control, Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor can be directly applicable to this form of performance. Yet, the distinction between actor and audience is more explicit than in physical performance – the audience's presence is only visible through page hits and commentary. The lurkers are not visible, the silent rustle of reaction is not audible.

Goffman argues, "fronts tend to be selected, not created" (28). Bloggers most certainly choose the front that they wish to project. Jane, for example, has chosen to present the angsty side of her personality and is often concerned that people who don't know her might get the wrong impression if they just read her blog. That said, the idea that there is an established social role (27) for a blogger may now be true, but wasn't always. In its inception, the role of the blogger was unestablished in society. Bloggers established a new social role, metaphorically drawing extensively from known and established social roles – such as that of the journalist. In the past couple of years, as the assumptions drawn from these metaphors have been contested, the social role of the blogger is in disarray. Consider, for example, the current EFF vs. Apple lawsuit over whether or not a blogger is a journalist and can have the right to journalists' privileges. Or consider the bloggers who thought they were only blogging for friends but found out that a friends-only face is not appropriate in a publicly searchable and archived forum.

One challenge in interpreting Goffman is that his only conception of social interaction is in a face-to-face context. The advantage of such an unmediated environment is that the audience is always known, whether it is individuals or groups of people. Blogging, on the other hand, requires the blogger to envision their audience and negotiate it without any feedback as to who is actually listening. This requires a highly nuanced maintenance of expression, particularly when the blogger wants to make different statements to different groups of people. In other words, there are layers of front and back stages and the blogger is constantly managing access through intentionally constructed speech.

Even in the last week, my blog is filled with such layered references. The reference to Bosley, which you probably didn't think twice about, is explicitly targeted at my friend A and her advisor P – they did not miss this at all. The Bunny of the Month club was an explicit joke to my friend G, referencing a dead bunnies joke that pervaded our trip to Tokyo. Fuck SMS.ac was in order to aggravate that company, all the meanwhile telling people not to use their service and making a public statement of support for my friend Joi. And, of course, clouds begin to pass is the documentation of X's crises in very coded terms. All have varying layers of references – you probably realized that this was about X, but most of my 1000+ readers did not.

There are layers and layers of performance going on here, some of which are discernable to mass audiences, others of which have little or no value to anyone outside of the small niche of friends and folks who are just like the blogger. Consider, for example, the different audience targets of AznGirl and BoingBoing. To those who are close to the authors of BoingBoing, the purportedly news-like entries contain a lot of information about the author's moods, daily activities, debates, etc. The difference is that the backstage is very far from the frontstage while for AznGirl, there's a much more accessible connection.

Unlike most speech acts, blog entries are often more crafted. Of course, whether they are speech or text in Ong's terms is still up for debate. That said, blog entries are typically written in an explosion of text with zero review, rants like the ones often espoused by their authors in everyday speech. Once posted, they are rarely edited and edits are typically marked with things like "update." Yet, even through blog entries are more carefully crafted than the typical speech act, involuntary information often seeps through. Blog expressions have the same form of given and given off sign activity that dominates physical expressions. What is given is speech in the most narrow of senses – the actual text and images of posts, the coloring and templating of the page. Yet, material is also given off. At the highest level, the domain name has significance, the page hit counters tell viewers about audience and the comments reveal aspects of the bloggers' speech that may not be otherwise viewable. More deeply, the tone and formulation is often conveying information about the speaker that is not part of what is intentionally given, often because the audience is different than the intended audience.

Yet, while some material is clearly given off, many of the types of given off material to which we are accustomed in everyday life are not available in digital life. The embodied cues that often accompany vocal performance, such as clothing, hand gestures, facial expression and voice tones are not present in blogs. While we can negotiate these things consciously, creating intentionally given cues, there are also aspects of these that are given off – things that we don't realize we do but that aide in our performance. Bloggers often use more descriptive terms and smiley faces to adjust for given signals, but the unconscious signals given off that they are accustomed to accommodating for are not there. This results in a form of misinformation. Consider what happens when bloggers write about communities to which they are a part – racial communities, gender and sexuality communities, etc. Without the cues to identify the blogger as part of that community, those posts are often read as prejudicial. Whether or not there is inwardly-directed prejudice is debatable, but this is often a shock for the blogger who assumes that their embodied identity is visible and part of the dialogue – given off information that is forgotten to be explicitly performed. In this sense, while the blog may be a digital body, that digital body has very different properties than the one that we embody everyday.

Different types of misinformation exist throughout blogging. Some of this is deceptive, such as my posts indicating that i am not checking email. This is intentionally constructed to discourage my readers from sending me email. Jane's constant whining is also a form of misinformation by giving the reader the impression that this is who Jane is, rather than indicating that this is only one facet of her reality.

This reading of misinformation stems from the difficulty in distinguishing what constitutes a performance. For Goffman, a performance is "defined as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants" (15). From the blogger's perspective, a blog post is the most obvious delimiter of a performance, but from the audience's perspective, the front page of a blog might be viewed as a continuous performance. Another challenge stems from Goffman's definition of an interaction as "all the interaction which occurs throughout any one occasion when a given set of individuals are in one another's continuous presence" (15). Aside from the complicated notion of presence that is at play in blogging, the relative lack of access between audience members makes it difficult to describe inter-relations between audience members. The same performance, while performed for a wide audience through one performance act by the blogger is not temporarily read simultaneously by the audience members. Furthermore, their interactions with the performance are multi-modal and often not accessible to other audience members. Common practice dictates that responses come in physical space, via AIM or email, via trackbacks, via comments or through a set of unreadable facial reactions that are not even accessible to the performer.

In discussing the maintenance of a front, Goffman separates between appearance and manner (24). Although there is certainly appearance to blogs, the signals given here are hardly the signals one is accustomed to in everyday life – age, sex, race, clothing, facial expressions, etc. The emphasis is on the manner, or the ways in which the information is conveyed. A blog's appearance can be eliminated by newsreaders that allow the viewer to alter the color, font and adorning information. More importantly, a blog's appearance is rarely modified and ends up not having the significant weight as in everyday life. As such, the manner of a front is far more central to the performance.

Post

With the lack of proper "appearance" in mind, i now want to turn to Post. Since the earliest days of cyberculture, there was a utopian/dystopian rhetoric that you could finally be free of the constraints of the body. Gender, race, class, and appearance – none of these would matter because no one knows you're a dog online. Furious about this, Amy Bruckman created a project called "The Turing Game" where people declared identity information like "gender" and then everyone had to figure out whose bodies matched their speech using a form of 20 questions like "How much toilet paper do you use a month?" Much to everyone's surprise, most people could determine who was being deceptive within a few rounds. Since then, extensive work has been done to show that embodied identity information "seeps through" online. In other words, appearance affects identity at a core.

While this work is fairly extensive in STS and cyberculture studies, blogging rhetoric reflects antiquated ideas that free access means that blogging is equalizing and democratic. This was excessively highlighted during the war and election when bloggers became tropes for democratic journalism. Of course, the vast majority of bloggers that are identified as journalistic bloggers are straight white men from the same educational and class backgrounds as most journalists and the topics and geographic regions that they cover are statistically no different than those of mainstream media (Zuckerman).

Although bloggers' audiences may not be able to easily decipher the physical appearance of a given blogger unless a photo is present, most regular readers quickly determine prominent identity features through extended access to the manners and form of the textual output. Some information may also be available in profiles, bios and in the name the blogger chooses to adopt. Stereotypes are often built based on attributes derived from the text. For example, AznGirl's alternate capitalization is stereotypically associated with Asian-identified individuals in their teens and early 20s.

The concept of equality in blogging stems from the same logic as in the blind orchestra audition in Post's account. Post notes that such blindness is supposed to counteract gender discrimination because it is assumed that quality of musicianship is inherently ungendered. Likewise, the blogging as textual production is assumed to be ungendered, unraced, unsexualized. Not only is this not the case, most bloggers are not trying to transcend these identity markers – they are simply trying to be themselves and who they are is very much gendered, raced and sexualized.

Audience in blogging is primarily built through social networks, which are notoriously homogenizing. If blogging were truly blind, blogrolls, or the list of blogs that a person reads would be diverse. Yet, in all of my research, blogrolls tend to replicate the same homogenous tendencies as other social networks – black bloggers have blogrolls with other black bloggers, women are rarely included in the blogrolls of men, etc.

In responding to Post, Appiah points out that another conflation of the legal argument is that equality and sameness are interchangeable. What makes the body so visible in blogging has to do with the fact that appearance has become central to the person, central to their identity. Culture is gendered, raced and sexualized. Given the deeply rooted differences based on experience, there is no such thing as sameness. Conceptualizing equality from there is foolish.

The assumption in anti-discrimination law is that people can transcend bodily appearances to truly 'see' more salient, meaningful qualities about a person. Yet, in blogging, where the even bodily appearances are not directly visible, readers do not transcend bodily appearances. They are embedded in the text, in the production of self. Given this form of 'blindness' is such transcendence even possible?

With only digital bodies to perform, one might assume that bodily appearances would not matter. Yet, as Post notes "the presentation of appearances in everyday life is not merely a matter of the external surfaces of the self, for appearances are also connected to identity" (3). Butler affirms this, stating that "The person is and is not, centrally, his or her appearance" but then asks "Where do we go from here?" (74)

In building bridges between blogging and Goffman/Post, my goal is simply to highlight that these issues emerge even outside of the bodied realities that we all take for granted. The embodied nature of digital presentation of self may not look like the one in which we are accustomed, but it helps highlight how deeply appearances operate and how important the management of performance continues to be.


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November 26, 2004

Cameron Marlow: "Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community"

Marlow, Cameron. 2004. "Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community" Presented at the International Communication Association Conference. New Orleans, LA.

Synopsis:

Marlow analyzes blogging from the perspective of link structure, considering how authority is manifested within the community through links as a proxy for social structure. He is employing social network analysis as a method for understanding the relationship structure.

"While some of these webloggers identify with the progenitors of the medium, others feel that their practice is distinct from that form." (1)

Measures of authority: popularity (webloggers' public affiliations) and influence (citation of each others' writing).

"Network analysis is well suited for the study of weblogs as many of the socialrelationships between weblog authors are explicitly stated in the form of hypertext links." (2)

Discussion of Clay Shirky's power law curves and assumptions that every weblogger wanted to be recognized as a opinion leader.

"The remainder of this paper will explore thisquestion in depth, namely what a link to a weblog means, the different types of social links that can occur, and how to understand authority in this social environment." (3)

Marlow defines Weblog Social Ties through blogrolls, permalinks, comments and trackbacks before introducing Blogdex methodology and data.

In the bulk of the paper, Marlow discusses various data that he acquired. The key finding shows that older well-known bloggers do not continue to have influence. Although their names are known (and they are regularly blogrolled), what they write is not regularly linked to, indicating a lower influence rate.

Continue reading "Cameron Marlow: "Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community""

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November 25, 2004

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

Herring, Susan; Lois Ann Scheidt; Sabrina Bonus; Elijah Wright. 2004. "Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs". Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science HICSS-37.

Abstract:

Weblogs (blogs)—frequently modified web pages inwhich dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence—are the latest genre of Internet communication to attain widespread popularity, yet their characteristics have not been systematically described. This paper presents the results of a content analysis of 203 randomly-selected weblogs, comparing the empirically observable features of the corpus with popular claims about the nature of weblogs, and finding them to differ in a number of respects. Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented towards external events, and under-estimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self-expression. Based on the profile generated by the empirical analysis, we consider the likely antecedents of the blog genre, situate it withrespect to the dominant forms of digital communication on the Internet today, and advance predictions about its long-term impacts.

Synposis:

This article begins with a historical review of where blogging came from and what motivates the hype for various parties.

"Our analysis suggests that the blog is neither fundamentally new nor unique, but that it—along with other emergent genres driven by interactive web technologies—occupies a new position in the Internet genre ecology. Specifically, it forms a de facto bridge between multimedia HTML documents and text-based computer-mediated communication, thereby blurring the traditional distinction between these two dominant Internet paradigms, and potentially contributing to its breakdown in the future." (2)

Genre Analysis. Based on Yates & Orlinowski's work on email which uses rhetoric's version of genre theory to classify "typified acts of communication" based on form and substance, communicative purposes and structures, style, content and intended audience (2). [This section includes a great synopsis of using genre theory to analyze the web.]

Previous Definitions. Bloggers construct definition based on the format, frequency, link structure. Introduces Blood's classification (filters, journals, notebooks). Introduces Krishnamurthy's dimensional classification (personal vs. topical, individual vs. community).

Sample. 203 blogs from blo.gs (which pulls from a handful of blog services).

Methodology. Content analysis. Coded for characteristics of the blog authors when possible, purpose of the blog (filter, personal journal, k-log, mixed purpose, other). Did structural analysis of the blogs (links, images, search, adverts, etc.). Coded for temporal information (update recency, interval and age).

Findings:
- Blog authors: young adult males, similar to other public communication environments [note: does not include LJ, indicative of sample]
- Purpose: 70% are writing personal journals (even without LJ/DL/DJ); females and teens are more likely to write personal journals; "the blogs in this sample share a common purpose: to express the author's subjective, often intimate perspective on matters of interest to him or her. In the case of most blogs, the matters of interest concern the authors and their daily lives." (5)
- Temporal: [sampling concerns]
- Structural components: in order: archives, badges, images, comments, , email, ads, search, calendar, guestbook; Blogger, MT, Pitas, Radio Userland; links to websites, other blogs, news, websites about self, webrings
- Entry body features analyzed too, word average, paragraphs, etc.

"Blood's claim about the origins of the blog is based on the assumption that blogs are link-centered filters of Web content. Our findings show that this assumption misrepresents most blogs at the present time." (9)

Notes an off-line antecedent with the diary journal, k-logs and other primary genre types, arguing that it is not a unique web genre (10). Suggests that blogs also share similarities with other digital genres such as homepages for identity representation.

"All of this suggests that blogs, rather than having a single source, are in fact a hybrid of existing genres, rendered unique by the particular features of the source genres they adapt, and by their particular technological affordances." (10)

"Ultimately, we believe that blogs have the potential to change the way we think about the Web and about CMC, by rendering obsolete any hard-and-fast distinction between the two." (11)

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November 23, 2004

Michelle Gumbrecht: "Blogs as 'Protected Space''"

Gumbrecht, Michelle. 2004. "Blogs as 'Protected Space''" Presented at the Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis, and Dynamics: WWW 2004. New York: ACM Press.

Synopsis:

Introduces via PEW and Herring. Method: interviews with 23 people with blogs hosted by or around Stanford.

This paper is primarily a documentation of Gumbrecht's ethnographic exploration of blogging in the Stanford community, with a focus on people who produce content for personal purposes and those who use blogs in an educational setting. Many great quotes.

Findings:

  • "Despite bloggers' freedom to discuss anything and talk about anyone in their blogs, we found that bloggers imposed constraints on themselves." (2)
  • "Our informants were able to selectively filter their audience by tailoring their posts to them." (2) [note: coded language based on common ground allowing for multiple reads depending on emotional proximity]
  • "Some informants within our sample adopted the practice of forewarning their audience about the contents of their blog. ... "includes as many disclaimers as possible" when he blogs about someone. He added that bloggers' posts can have "an edge" but you should not throw a bomb"." (2)
  • "we found that our informants sometimes preferred communicating through their blogs as opposed to other means. ... We found that the majority of our informants used IM as a means of communication, yet would sometimes shun it in favor of blogging" (3)
  • "In blogging, grounding occurs neither cotemporally nor simultaneously. This turned out to be part of the allure for some of our informants to selectively communicate through their blogs." (3)
  • "responses are not expected immediately in this medium. In face-to-face conversation or IM, responses are expected immediately or close to it. As a result, conversational partners may feel ill at ease when trying to broach a sensitive issue in these media. Lara said she would never tell people, "I'm really sad" in IM, yet she would have no qualms about stating it in her blog." (3)
  • "Jack, an avid contributor to listservs, found that he liked blogs better because they are much less "adversarial" and generally more "reflective"." (3)
  • "However, when conflicts do arise over blog content, they tend to be transferred to other, more interactive media." (3)
  • "We found that limited interactivity is a flexible, context-specific notion. In educational, group, and community settings, our bloggers placed a high value on comments and feedback to "create a dialogue"." (4)
  • "However, blogs created for educational purposes do not abide by the same rules as personal blogs. Educational blogs aren't created to share deep, private revelations about oneself." (4)
  • "comments are "the heart of the blog medium - others would contest this - but I think a big part of making it publicly available is to have responses"." (4)
  • "Katie, a graduate student in Electrical Engineering, didn't like having other people post commentaries on her site because she couldn't control what they would say." ... "On the other hand, Harriet, also a graduate student in Electrical Engineering, believed comments are very important because they "enhance the sense of community that you get...it makes you feel good that people are reading it." (4)

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