Research/ Analysis of blogs

Weblogs, or ‘blogs’, are websites that allow authors to maintain ongoing, reverse-chronological entries for an audience, link to other webpages and interact with readers via comments. There are a wide variety of blog genres, ranging from individual online diaries to corporate blogs, but they tend to be associated with more personal and spontaneous forms of writing. In this talk, I use the term “Blog Analysis” to refer to a wide range of approaches. Social researchers have used blogs as a source of data in a variety of ways, from conducting a content analysis of gender and language use to ethnographic participation in blogging communities. Moreover, while social scientists may be interested in the practice of blogging itself, this new documentary resource also lends itself to innovative ways of asking questions about ‘offline’ life.