Introduction
My first introduction to blogging was at a media history conference in California nearly a decade ago. On the first morning of the conference, I was walking through the host university’s campus, admiring the brilliantly clear sky and the beautiful orange trees, on a hunt to find breakfast when I came across another delegate sitting cross-legged on a stone bench tapping away at his laptop. Having exchanged greetings and enquiries about the breakfast (he didn’t know where it was arranged either), I made some passing comment about him desperately trying to finish his paper. No, he assured me somewhat smugly, the paper was all finished – he was ‘blogging the conference’. In other words, he was writing about his experience at the conference by posting to his blog. His blog had a history theme, and was publicly accessible, but he aimed to write a mixture of subject-related matter and more personal posts. I had just interrupted him in a post about the beauty of the campus and the warmth of the day. He aimed to write a couple of posts a day, which would help his friends and family keep in touch with his activities while he was abroad, hopefully offer some useful information about current research to his students and also publicise the conference to those who might be interested.
It turned out that breakfast had not in fact been organised by the conference organisers and, on further investigation, that the oranges were horribly inedible, but I mostly remember this conference as the one where I was introduced to the fascinating world of the blogosphere. My colleague was a comparatively early adopter of a craze that was soon to sweep the world and I caught sight of him on several occasions during the conference explaining his activities to interested delegates – some of whom, like myself, may have left that conference determined to investigate the world of blogging a little more.
My own interest in blogging was piqued by the similarities I could already see between blogging and my own research interests at that time in correspondence to newspapers. I had been undertaking research into women’s correspondence to newspaper editors during the early years of the twentieth century and was particularly interested in the way in which some women were able to use the ‘Letters to the Editor’ columns in newspapers to step out of their domestic setting and make their opinions about local, national or even international affairs known outside their circle of friends and family. The letters columns of local newspapers offered Edwardian women a place where they could safely access the public sphere and join in the public debate while feeling secure in their private sphere. The pen names that they chose (frequently referring to their status as wife or mother) and the way in which many of the letters were framed to discuss their chosen subject from a domestic point of view positioned these women on the cusp between the private and the public spheres. Given that local newspaper practices of that time meant that all letters sent to the editor were published as long as the correspondent’s name and address were supplied (although they could request that they were not printed in the newspaper), women could even use the columns to discuss points of view and issues that were contrary to the stated opinions of the newspapers – the fight for women’s suffrage being a frequent case in point in those years before the First World War. They were thus able to use their letters to the editor to engage in public debate at a time when the emergence of women from the home was both a controversial subject and a growing phenomenon (Pedersen, 2002a, 2002b, 2004). Were modern women (and men) now using their blogs to make a similar contribution to the public debate? The fact that bloggers have full editorial control over their blog and can reveal as much or as little about themselves as they wish might make blogging even more attractive than writing letters to newspapers for those who wished to contribute their voice to the public debate.
I was not the only one to make a link between blogging and the public’s use of newspapers: many commentators in the media who were tasked with explaining the phenomenon of blogging in those early days made references to newspaper opinion columns and ‘Letters to the Editor’ that allowed members of the general public to ‘blow off steam’ about local or national issues in an informal yet public way. It was also exciting to come across such a useful source for accessing the opinions and thoughts of what could be described as ‘ordinary citizens’ rather than professional authors, politicians and others more familiar with debate in the public sphere.
My initial interest in blogging was therefore naturally focused on women’s use of blogging and, in 2003, I undertook a small pilot study using content analysis to investigate 50 women’s blogs. The analysis was particularly concerned with the stated motivations of these women for writing a blog, whether a change in motivation could be perceived over time and the audience (if any) for whom they considered themselves to be writing.
What is a blog?
It would probably be helpful at this point to give a short introduction to the blogosphere and offer some basic definitions of blogs, blogging and associated phenomena. Rebecca Blood, an early blogger and published writer on the phenomenon, offers a useful posting on the history of blogs on her blog Rebecca’s Pocket(http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html) and I recommend that anyone who wants to know more about the history of blogging start there. She tells us that we usually date the phenomenon of weblogs or blogs from 1998–9 and that weblogs were so named by Jorn Barger in December 1997, but quickly shortened to ‘blog’ within a few years. In 1997, Jesse James Garrett, the editor of the proto-blog Infoshift, started to identify and collect other sites that were similar to his own and his ‘page of only weblogs’ listed the 23 sites he had identified by 1999 (http://www.jjg.net/retired/portal/tpoowl.html). Again, in 1999, Birgitte Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the EatonWeb portal (http://portal.eatonweb.com). Other important prototype weblogs include Dave Winer’s Scripting News and Rob Malda’s Slashdot, both of which started in 1997.
Blogging was initially restricted to those who had the necessary programming skills and thus many of the early blogs were related to IT and the Internet in some way. However, with the introduction of cheap and easy-to-use build-your-own blog software such as Pitas and Blogger in 1999, it became possible for anyone with an Internet connection to create his or her own blog and this resulted in the explosion of the ‘blogosphere’ (the collective community of all blogs) over the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Blogs can be defined as ‘frequently updated, reverse-chronological entries on a single webpage’ (Blood, 2004). The original blogs were filtertype web pages, essentially editing the Internet for their readers, directing the reader to other blogs and websites and offering commentary and often the opportunity for readers’ discussion, either with the blogger or among themselves. The main focus of these early blogs was on the links they offered – Blood refers to blog ‘editors’ rather than authors or writers and researchers such as Mortensen and Walker (2002: 265) were still describing blogs as ‘focusing on connections and on brief nuggets of thought. Links are vital to the genre’ in 2002. In comparison, the newer, so-called ‘journal’, blogs that arrived at the beginning of the twenty-first century focus more on commentary, which may also include links and reader responses depending on the theme and purpose of the weblog. Thus, with the popularisation of blogging, the web-bibliographical function has ceased to be the main criterion of blogs. Whereas filter blogs are heavily reliant on links to and from their site and the comments of readers, journal blogs tend to have smaller audiences, less reader participation and fewer links to other sites. In Herring et al.’s (2004) sample of 203 blogs, only 31.8 per cent contained links, which is a reflection of the prevalence of the personal journal blog in the sample (Herring, 2004a). It might also be argued that link-driven filter blogs tend to be focused on external events, whereas ‘journal’ bloggers write more about events in their own lives. However, it is important not to impose this filter/journal division too strictly when investigating the blogosphere since most bloggers use a mixture of styles, with filter bloggers discussing their personal responses to external events such as new software, wars or elections and personal journal bloggers recording and commenting on external events as well as on their own interests.
Although there were only 23 websites identified as blogs in 1997, with the introduction of easy-to-use software, the blogosphere grew quickly. In 2008, the blog-tracking directory and search engine Technorati claimed that it had indexed 133 million blogs since 2002 (Technorati: State of the Blogosphere, 2008). Of course, not all of these blogs are frequently updated and a high proportion of blogs are abandoned: Dave Sifry, the founder of Technorati, estimates that as much as 45 per cent of the blogosphere is made up of abandoned blogs (Sifry, 2005). Some are never used but are created as tests or as automatic features on social community sites such as MySpace or Bebo, which are particularly popular with teenagers (Henning, 2005). I have to admit my own responsibility here for some of these abandoned blogs – I have run labs in which I have asked an entire class of students to set up a blog in order to explore the phenomenon, and I expect that the majority of these have just been abandoned to float empty around the blogosphere once the class has been released. Huffaker found that 43 per cent of his sample of teenage bloggers had abandoned blogs (2004) and an increasing proportion of all blogs – according to Sifry about 9 per cent – are fake or spam (2006).
The arrival of the journal blog changed the nature of blogging. Although, among its practitioners, blogging is frequently characterised as socially interactive and community-like in nature, some research suggests that it is not so in practice (Herring et al., 2004a). Although journal blogs do discuss external issues and events, they often do so from personal perspectives. This may again indicate a growing number of women bloggers since, as Herring pointed out as far back as 1994, women who participate in discussion on the Internet tend to display a personal orientation. In addition, most of the journal blogs investigated in early studies of the blogosphere did not show high interactivity. Many had a fairly small set of regular readers and the bloggers might receive feedback on their blogs not just from such commentators but also in ‘real life’. Nardi et al. (2004b) found that some blogs even facilitated in-person social contact, for example if the blogger was travelling. Although the ‘A-list’ blogs receive hundreds of comments a day, Nardi et al. (2004b) suggested that most journal blogs are read by only a few friends and that bloggers have ‘regulars’ who they know are reading their posts.
Nevertheless, in the past ten years, blogging has evolved from being a specialist niche activity, indulged in only by those with advanced programming skills and known about by only a select few, to being part of the global culture. In June 2008, Technorati was tracking blogs in 88 different languages. Teenagers, politicians, lawyers, journalists, comedians and stay-at-home moms all blog. Events have their own blog – as do institutions. The principal of my university uses a blog to communicate with staff and students. Blogging has been discovered by marketing and PR departments as a way of establishing a two-way dialogue with particular publics. As we will see, bloggers can even hope to make money through their blog. You can sell advertising on your blog, sell subscriptions to your blog, be paid for mentioning products or even be approached by newspapers or publishers impressed enough by your blogging to offer you a contract.
Early research on the blogosphere
As stated previously, my first investigation into the blogosphere took place in 2003, when it was a slightly smaller place – by April 2004, it was estimated that there were 1.3 million sites calling themselves blogs on the Web, of which it was estimated that about 870,000 were actively maintained (Schiano et al., 2004). At that time, blogging was not the recognised phenomenon that it is today and I usually spent the first part of any conversation about my research defining basic terms – which was a new experience for someone who had spent the previous six years researching ‘women’ and ‘newspapers’, neither of which had required half as much explanation. Words like ‘blog’ and ‘blogosphere’ were greeted with suspicion by the version of Word then on my university’s computers and the online display of the conference papers and articles I started to write had red wiggly lines underneath so many words that the casual observer must have assumed that I was borderline illiterate. For a historian, it was also a new experience to be working in a discipline with a comparatively small and very recent amount of published academic research and also to discover that the ‘experts’ on blogging might not necessarily be found in universities. In 2002, Mortensen and Walker commented that there was a considerable amount of popular writing on blogs but to date no published research on the topic. Even in 2004, Susan Herring was stating that scholarship on weblogs was still in its infancy with little published literature as yet.
In my first blogging project, I undertook a content analysis of 50 women’s blogs over a period of six months, focusing on the reasons for blogging given in these blogs. The blogs were selected using the randomising feature of the blog-tracking website www.globeofblogs.com, selected as a data source because at the time it was tracking a large number of blogs from diverse sources. The only criteria for the selection of blogs were that they were written in English and by a woman over the age of 18. Inactive blogs were as useful as active blogs for this research because the reasons for someone to cease blogging were also of interest. I found the ‘About Me’ section that most blogs offer of particular use in this research, but most blogs also offer an archive section in which previous posts can be accessed and the majority of the blogs selected for this study offered access to two or three years’ worth of posts.
My focus on motivations was a legacy of my previous work on correspondence to newspapers and also a desire to evaluate how this new mode of communication was being used by women, particularly since some research in the United States suggested that women made up at least 50 per cent of all journal bloggers (Herring et al., 2004a). The limited amount of published academic research on the subject of blogging at that time tended to focus on the categorisation and characterisation of blogs or bloggers – for example Krishnamurthy (2002) proposed the classification of blogs into four basic types along two dimensions: personal versus topical and individual versus community. In addition, my research eventually came to focus on the British blogosphere. When I started my research on blogging, the majority of published research was based on the experiences and categorisation of American bloggers, although this was soon to be augmented by valuable works on non-English-language blogging and experiences outside the West. Given my (embarrassing) lack of language skills and my base in the United Kingdom, I decided to focus on the British blogosphere, evaluating UK-specific use of blogging and, in particular, comparing it to earlier research conducted in the United States. Much of the early basic characterisation of the blogger, for example the picture of him as a young, white university student or graduate, was established by research conducted by US teams such as those led by Susan Herring. For example, the findings of Schiano et al. (2004) (mentioned below) were based on ethnographic interviews and content analysis of blogs conducted in June 2003 with 23 bloggers, seven of whom were women. Schiano et al. stated that they felt that such a sample was representative since ‘at this time bloggers are primarily current or recent students living in the US and blogging in English’ (2004: 1144). I wished to explore whether such characterisations could be applied to other parts of the Anglo-centric blogosphere and whether British bloggers, for the most part members of a second wave of blogging rather than early adopters, could be categorised differently.
Some research on bloggers’ motivations had been carried out by this time – as stated, mainly in the United States – so it could be used as a base against which to compare my own findings. For example, as part of the debate about the categorisation of blogs, Nardi et al. (2004b) suggested categorising blogs according to purpose, offering the following five basic purposes:
1. Documenting the author’s life
2. Providing commentary and opinions
3. Expressing deeply felt emotions (‘the blog as catharsis’)
In the same year, this team of researchers also suggested the following motivations for journal blogging in particular:
1. As diaries and personal record-keeping
2. As a continuing chronicle or newsletter
5. As news digests or newspaper op/ed columns
6. As a forum for ongoing work (Schiano et al., 2004).
Here, the team used familiar concepts – the diary, the newspaper column and so on – in order to explain blogging to non-bloggers. Such an approach has been criticised by some researchers, for example by boyd (2005a), who criticises both academics and the mainstream media for the use of metaphors like diary-writing and publishing when describing blogging. She suggests that when Nardi et al. used the title ‘Blogging as a social activity, or, Would you let 900 million people read your diary?’ for their 2004 journal article, it perpetuated a connection between blogging and diary-writing that many bloggers themselves reject. However she does admit that even blogging tools and services have used such descriptions in the past, with Blogger using terms such as ‘push-button publishing’ and Diaryland and LiveJournal embedding such terms in their names. We will investigate this debate further later in the book.
It was also possible to build on previous work undertaken on motivations for the use of other earlier Internet phenomena. Much of this work utilised uses-and-gratification theory: the assumption that users actively seek out different media and that media consumption can satisfy a variety of needs. As Kaye (2007) points out, the reasons for using a particular Internet resource can vary depending on how it functions and the types of interaction that it allows. Those Internet resources that allow two-way communication, such as blogs or bulletin boards, offer users different satisfactions from those offered by websites, which only offer one-way communication – the difference between broadcasting and partaking in dialogue between either two or many individuals or groups.
In particular, very relevant research had already been undertaken on motivations for the construction of personal home pages, which predated blogs on the World Wide Web. Papacharissi (2002) had suggested six motivations for creating a personal home page: sharing information, entertainment, self-expression, communication with friends and family, passing time and professional advancement. Her later (2007) work on blogging motivations agreed with Nardi et al. (2004a) that bloggers were primarily motivated by desires for personal expression and social interaction.
Most usefully, Clancy Ratliff, based at the University of Minnesota, was also undertaking research on women’s motivations for blogging, asking questions such as: does blogging give women a sense of empowerment? Does it accomplish anything for women and feminism? Why do women find blogging attractive?
Research on the British blogosphere
A pilot study of 48 British bloggers was undertaken in the winter and spring of 2005–6 (I refer to this throughout the book as the 2006 study). It was financed by a grant from The Robert Gordon University’s Research Development Initiative and I was joined on the project by a part-time researcher, Dr Caroline Macafee, from the Department of Information Management, whose assistance during this time was invaluable. In particular, we were interested in seeing whether blogging in the United Kingdom, which in general started somewhat later than in North America, reproduced the gender differences in blogging behaviour, and the gender inequalities in recognition that had been observed in studies based largely on American bloggers, thus shedding light, from a different direction, on some of the reasons that had been advanced for women having less influence and less popular success in this field.
Our sample of 24 women and 24 men was drawn from two blogrings, or directories, that allowed bloggers to identify themselves as British: Globe of Blogs and Britblog.com. In the case of the latter, which was organised geographically and offered the opportunity to select bloggers from a map of the United Kingdom, care was taken to select similar numbers of bloggers from each geographical area of the United Kingdom, including Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The selected bloggers had to be individuals resident in the United Kingdom (and not obviously transient) and contactable by e-mail. While the majority of bloggers offer the possibility of being contacted through posting a comment on their blog, not all offer their readers the possibility of contacting them more privately through e-mail. Bloggers were selected until we had an equal number of men and women and their blogs were checked to ensure that they had posted within the previous month (in other words, that their blogs were current). The gender of the blog authors was determined through the names, photographs and information given in the blog postings such as references to ‘my wife’ or ‘when I gave birth’. Blogs in which the gender could not be ascertained were discarded. In this study, we confined our sample to bloggers aged over 18. In the blogosphere at large, a very large proportion of blogs is written by adolescents. In purely numerical terms, teenage bloggers predominate: bloggers under 19 made up 58.3 per cent in Henning’s (2005) figures, up from 52.8 per cent in 2003. This population of bloggers is usually studied separately, as the social dynamic of communication among adolescents is different from that among adults (Huffaker and Calvert, 2005; boyd, 2005b, 2006; Kumar et al., 2004; Lenhart and Madden, 2005).
Three methods were used to collect data. Firstly, a questionnaire was sent to our selected bloggers via e-mail. This was designed to explore blogging practices, attitudes and motivations, drawing on previous literature and my own earlier study. The questionnaire included open and closed questions. (It should be noted that although 48 surveys were completed, not all of our respondents chose to answer all of the questions. Thus, when giving details of the responses in the book, I will sometimes also give the number of respondents for that question. This methodology will also be followed with the second survey administered in 2007.)
Secondly, a content analysis of the blogs allowed us to note characteristics of the blog that were visible to inspection. These included the age of the blog (in months), based on the starting-point of the archives; links in the blogroll; the number and nature of enhancements to the blog, such as site meters and logos or links for other blog services; if there was a site meter, whether visitor statistics were hidden and, where available, the average number of visitors per day. A classification of the blog’s content was made on the basis of the ten postings prior to the submission date of the questionnaire. Unfortunately, in the short space of time during which data collection was underway, two blogs were closed down. The archives were cleared from two others, whereas one did not keep an archive. For all but one, we were able to base classifications instead on earlier postings (preserved on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine) or on later postings: we do not believe the content type had changed in the interim. The content categories that seem best to represent the sampled blogs were personal, opinion and politics, religion, criticism, work and business, information technology, creative work (including literary writing), lesbian sexuality and links and chance discoveries. Many blogs have a mixture of content, but it is not difficult to identify the dominant themes so long as allowance is made for most blogs having a fair amount of personal content.
Lastly, a third set of data was retrieved from a range of blog-monitoring sites. These included the Technorati ranking of each blog (if ranked); a figure for the number of inward links, averaged from Technorati and Blogpulse figures (over variable periods of time depending on the content of the blogs’ feeds) and the number of outward links and images in the current feed, expressed as figures per 1,000 words, based on the data from SurfWax for 44 of the 48 blogs.
We also devised a measure of the technical sophistication of the blogs in the form of an impressionistic five-point scale. The different capabilities of different blog hosts were taken into account. For example, not all hosts give the facility to paste code into the template, which limits the scope to add enhancements. One blog was omitted from the classification as no information could be found about the software used. The scale is as follows:
2 = pasting into template (Blogger), adding images (Livejournal);
3 = adding artwork, deleting or modifying the ‘About Me’ section;
The blogs were also assigned to one of three ‘success’ levels (top, middle or bottom) on the basis of the highest value among:
the figure for daily traffic, where available;
the Technorati rank (top 10,000, top 100,000, top million, or unranked).
As stated previously, the findings from this research are referred to throughout the book as the 2006 study. The study led to some interesting insights into the current state of the British blogosphere and some preliminary observations about how and why British bloggers blogged, which are discussed in detail throughout this book. However, any comparisons to the blogosphere outside the United Kingdom had to be based on the research of others. The next step was therefore to expand the research to include a comparison between British and American bloggers. A further research project was therefore carried out between September 2006 and May 2007 and supported by a research leave award from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Unfortunately, funding was not available for research assistance and I was therefore forced to ‘go it alone’ at this stage of the project.
Using a very similar survey to the 2006 study, 60 British and 60 American bloggers (equal numbers of men and women) were surveyed about their approaches to blogging, including blogging techniques, habits, motivations and rewards. At the same time, data were collected directly from the respondents’ blogs and by means of online tools (Technorati, Surfwax and The Truth Laid Bear). The bloggers were again identified through the use of the blog directories Globe of Blogs and Britblog.com. Both directories offered the opportunity to identify a blogger’s home county or state, which meant that it was possible to ensure a wide coverage of both countries. The majority of bloggers indicated whether they were male or female in their ‘About Me’ page on the blog. For those who did not, it was usually easy enough to ascertain their gender through their blog postings. If gender or location was not identifiable, the bloggers were not contacted to take part in the survey. Although the project was not concerned about sexual orientation, the final sample of bloggers contained one British woman respondent who identified herself as a lesbian and one American man who identified himself as a gay. In addition, one of the British men was a transvestite. It should be noted that, during the eight months of the project, two of the British women respondents actually moved to live in North America, which probably explains why they were interested in a survey about blogging in the United Kingdom and the United States.
In addition to the survey and blog analysis, a blog related to the research was established, giving first-hand experience of the challenges of blogging and also offering the opportunity for further data collection since the surveyed bloggers were invited to comment on the research as it was ongoing. (And comment they did!)
The primary research findings reported in this book are therefore based on a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative data taken from 168 survey responses and the content and textual analysis of the respondents’ blogs conducted between 2005 and 2007 plus the analysis of another 50 women’s blogs conducted from 2003 onwards. The field of academic research on blogging is a developing one and previous academic research projects on the subject have been on a similar, or smaller, scale, particularly when based on qualitative research methods. For example, Gumbrecht’s (2004) interviews of 23 bloggers at or around Stanford University, Karlsson’s (2003) study of seven American-Japanese online diarists, Schiano et al.’s (2004) ethnographic interviews with 23 bloggers, Huffaker and Calvert’s (2005) sample of 70 teenage bloggers or Menchen-Trevino’s (2005) interviews with 14 college student bloggers. Studies that included quantitative methods such as surveys have tended to be larger – again usually on the same scale as ours – Efimova’s (2003) survey of 62 bloggers and 20 would-be bloggers, Trammell et al.’s (2006) quantitative content analysis of 358 Polish bloggers or Baker and Moore’s (2008) survey of 134 MySpace users. Some larger studies have tended to be divided into a larger survey (quantitative) and a smaller qualitative approach, i.e. the study by Brady (2006) who surveyed 167 bloggers and conducted 24 interviews or the study by van Doorn et al. (2007) who collected quantitative data from 100 Dutch and Flemish blogs and then conducted a qualitative analysis of four of these, whereas others, such as Miura and Yamashita’s (2007) online survey of 1,434 blog authors in Japan or the larger surveys conducted for Technorati or the Pew Internet and American Life Project, have tended to be mainly quantitative. Throughout the book, the primary data findings, both qualitative and quantitative, will therefore be compared with the findings and conclusions of other scholars in the field, including the aforementioned studies, noting where differences or similarities can be found. Although the sample is still too small for much statistical significance to be attributed to it, it is hoped that the combined quantitative and qualitative approach plus the reference to other scholarly research in the area will provide sufficient justification for my final conclusions.
The aim of this book
This book therefore aims to consolidate the findings of the three research projects outlined previously while focusing on the basic question of ‘Why blog?’ For the most part, the discussion focuses on personal rather than corporate blogs, although the data covers both filter- and journal-type blogs. I will also focus primarily on the British blogosphere, although comparisons will be made with American bloggers. Over the past decade, much more research has been conducted on the motivations of bloggers – both in the United States and elsewhere – and reference is made throughout the book to these findings. Subjects to be covered in this book include the blog as a diary or letters to the editor, blogging as therapy, blogging for friends and blogging for strangers, privacy issues, blogging as a form of journalism or publishing, blogging as political activism, blogging for profit and whether women and men (or Americans and Brits) differ in their reasons for blogging. I will also touch on professional blogging as a form of PR or citizen journalism, but these subjects are not the focus of this book, which mainly aims to interrogate the subject of what motivates ordinary men and women to blog.