Blog research

I’ve been writing about research on blogging in general and have tried to summarize in four broad categories: 1) Blogging as a new form of, or at least a very special challenge to, journalism. 2) Blogging as writing “an inside-out diary,” a more traditional understanding of what’s going on in a blog, focusing on things like identity and identity construction. 3) Blogs as tools or, more correct, as potential tools, in schools or other organizational contexts. 4) Blogging as participation in different sub-cultures or discourses, a more socio-cultural view.

Any comments on this are of great interest to me, of course. I know that people have tried different taxonomies on blogs, ranging from rough differentiation to high resolution. This is next on my agenda, but surveying the field should, the way I see it, include a description of different “entrance-points,” so I will first try out the four “streams” described here, before I connect it to the categorization of blogs.

One way to “try it out” is writing about it here, I guess. And I really advise you to click on the link at the beginning leading to “the introduction of the iRack.”