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208B: Blog Assignment 5

Examine three blogs of your choice. Aim for diverse blogs (group vs individual, personal vs journalistic, different types of people, etc).

  • Interview bloggers as part of your analysis. I will examine the following blogs:

    I will interview none of them. (First, I've been interviewing bloggers for 272 and second, that's a tad above-and-beyond the call of duty.)

  • Consider the content using genre analysis. Using genre analysis? That is, try and cubbyhole their writings as mostly one type of communication or another, right? I'll try. Prometheus is largely academic, institutional types of writings (not staring at my belly-button kind of stuff). They seem more interested in getting some of their thoughts on their field out into the wild and to get people thinking about them. I plan on spending a lot more time there when I get a lot more time to spend anywhere. So, what kind of communication is this close to? I would liken it to French Salons where debaters come to the table with some prepared argument... however, this Salon works asynchronously.

    Zeph mixes a little of everything in terms of genres... there are personal journal entries which are close to the type of talk you'd get from danah in the hallway in passing, there are more involved analytical posts where danah wants to provide new analysis to an issue of current event and there are the random posts that are just meant to communicate something simple (like a joke) to her audience.

    Eric Raymond's blog is more of a personalized public rant space (similar to Dave's the meat). He talks about how much he is attracted to Liv Tyler, how much he likes guns and how off-base the liberal community is. Nothing really academic... just more of a place to put his rants.

  • What motivates the users to post? I think in most cases, it's a need to fix thoughts in written form (similar to writing an email, but not to anyone in particular) coupled with a sense of urgency with respect to a current issue that has cropped up. The issues about which all these people write about vary quite a bit from issues that are being heavily discussed in the media and/or blogosphere to issues that the writer may only know about.

  • How do they categorize their entries? Prometheus uses many broad categories (Space Policy, Energy Policy, Biotechnology, etc.), Zeph uses no categories and Eric Raymond only uses 10 categories with a "General" category.

  • How do people decide who to link to? Prometheus and its bloggers link to all sorts of stuff from individual blogs to established media to academic papers. Danah (remember it can be capitalized at the beginning of a sentence like any other word) tries not to link to her friends too much but also links to a few individual blogs and an occasional academic paper (many of danah's posts contain no links whatsoever). Eric Raymond exclusively links to other arguments of individuals but attempts not to link much at all.

  • Use information theory (as reported in the game readings) to analyze your blog sample. There is a general tension in all of this between frequency of posts, length of posts and text vs. linked discussion. That is, people who don't post frequently, post longer pieces usually original prose. Those who post frequently have higher links/text and quoted text/original text ratios and have shorter posts. This, in terms of information theory, is interesting... it takes more time to extract signal from longer, original posts making an argument while the more frequent posters are more concerned with getting the quick signal to their audience (with the occasional longer post).

Posted by joebeone at Mayo 1, 2004 12:25 PM | TrackBack