Tuesday was blog day with full panels in all four time slots. I attended three of the four panels skipping the third one to attend a panel on "Teens and Youth Online." The presentations I saw went well; as did the presentation I gave. By far the best thing about blog day was the gathering of scholars who are thinking about this form into one room and giving them a catalyst to talk about what they see and think about blogs. I'm sure the conversations will continue into the future. Following is the program information for everyone that presented that day, including my own. I think I got everyone.

Author(s): Sarah Michele Ford

Title: Public and Private on LiveJournal: An Investigation of Bloggers' Opinions and Practices

Abstract: Background
The distinction between the public sphere and the private sphere is fundamental to liberal societies. Defenses, critiques, and reformulations of this dichotomy run from the disciplinary foundations of sociology through authors such as Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, and many others. Public and private are not, of course, fixed categories, and recently the gulf that had historically existed between the public sphere of the workplace and politics and the private sphere of domestic life seems to have narrowed, if not disappeared completely. Much of this breakdown is related to new trends in technology and media, marked by the prevalence (if not ubiquity) of mobile phones, telecommuting, reality television, and certain aspects of Internet use. Information and communications technologies in particular seem to be critical to this process, as noted by Salaff, Rule, Hull, Sheller and Urry, Ford, and Wellman.

Public, Private, and the 'Blog

The blogosphere is one segment of the Internet in which the collapse of the distinction between the public and the private is very apparent. 'Blogs, especially ones that take on the character of personal "journals" (as opposed to news logs, opinion columns, etc.), make it possible, even common, for elements of the blogger's life that at one time would have been kept in the "private" world to be launched into the "public" space of the Internet, visible to Internet users the world over. The media attention that 'blogs have received over the past year and a half only serves to increase the publicity of the world in which these journals are kept. As such, 'blogs and 'bloggers have much to tell us both about the collapse of the public/private dichotomy and about the effect of Internet use on everyday life. LiveJournal, a popular 'blog hosting service, provides its users with more privacy controls than do other services. With its "friends lock" feature, LJ enables its users to control who can view their posts. These privacy settings range from public (available for the whole world to see) to private (viewable only to the LiveJournal user who posted it). Thus, LiveJournal has blurred the distinction between public and private on the Internet.

The Project

In this project, I examine the ways in which LiveJournal users think about the distinction between the public and the private. I plan to generate a snowball sample of LiveJournal users, starting with a number of randomly selected journals and expanding outward using LiveJournal's "Friends List" feature. I will read the selected journals, and ultimately interview the 'bloggers about issues of public and private in their Internet use generally and on LiveJournal specifically. The bulk of this investigation will center on the ways in which LiveJournal users think about and utilize the system's "friends lock" feature, as this is the unique contribution that LiveJournal makes to the realm of public and private online.

The Larger Context

The project described above is part of a larger undertaking in which I will examine the ways in which information and communications technologies (especially the Internet) are implicated in and perhaps contributing to the collapse of the distinction between public and private. In addition to the study of public and private (and friends lock) on LiveJournal, I will carry out a similar study of bloggers using systems that do not include any such privacy settings (such as Blogger, Movable Type, etc.). I will then be able to compare these two groups of 'bloggers in order to understand the way that the breakdown of public and private is taking place in the realm of online journaling, and to better understand the breakdown itself. Finally, I will examine the 'blogs of a number of celebrities (musician Moby, comedienne Margaret Cho, and many others keep 'blogs of one sort or another) in order to begin to understand how the collapse of public and private plays out in the lives of those individuals who live in the spotlight.



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Author(s): Karen Gustafson

Title: " Blog Sites and the Creation of Community"

Abstract: Weblogs, or blogs, appeared on the Internet in the late 1990s and remain a significant online cultural phenomenon in the US and internationally. Despite the press coverage of blogs in online and traditional media sources, little has been written in scholarly research about these web sites as a form of community building. The research proposed here will examine several top-ranked political blogs, evaluating them according to standards of online community derived from the work of Jeffrey Abramson, Derek Foster, and Howard Rheingold. Ultimately, this paper intends to argue that blogging constitutes a significant, albeit strongly hierarchical, site of online community formation.
This research is significant because blogging offers a new space of online community and political debate. The Internet has long been considered a significant site of community building, linking distant people together via web sites and email lists. During a period of overwhelming consolidation in US and global media, the Internet is especially important as a public space, and blogs, online journal sites, may offer a new means of public interaction. Although there are no definite counts of blogs and blog participants, Blogger.com, one of the top online tools, has approximately 1.5 million members (Drier, 2003) and in September 2003, MacLean's reported estimates of up to two million blogs in existence (Snider, 2003).While the World Wide Web has become increasingly commercial and influenced by the mass media, blogs are potential sites for independent thought, media criticism, and community-building.

Community has been an important trope for years in online communication studies, and scholars such as Abramson, Rheingold, and Foster have contributed to a growing body of work addressing the potentials of Internet-based community. Jurgen Habermas' notion of the public sphere has been influential in many of these analyses, especially in the context of Internet commercialization. Rheingold draws upon Habermas in his analyses of virtual communities (1993). Referring to the Habermasian ideal speech space, Rheingold calls for a politically-conscious virtual citizenry that will resist the strategies of capitalist mass culture and authoritarian government. Abramson (1997) and Foster (1998) provide valuable theorizations of online community that will be utilized in this study. Foster argues that cohesive mutual interests are needed to constitute true community, and Abramson suggests that strong community is reliant upon manageable participant numbers, shared deliberation, and equality. Although these blogs are not expected to fully meet the criteria for community described by these scholars, this research suggests that blog sites do represent a significant, albeit imperfect, form of online community. Blogs are web sites with brief, frequently updated posts, and can be authored by a single person or by many contributors who post to the site. Thousands of blogs have emerged since 1997, when the term weblog was first coined, and together they compose a media ecosystem, often linking to one another (Stone, 2002). The entire system is often called the blogosphere. The blogosphere is measured both according to incoming links, or other sites linking to particular blogs, and also by audience numbers, measured by hits to the blog site. This research examines six highly ranked blogs, each chosen for its number of viewer hits (the number of times a unique IP address connects with the web site) and number of citations from other blogs. These blogs are Instapundit.com, Daily Kos, Eschaton, Andrew Sullivan.com, The Drudge Report, and the USS Cluelesssites, each of which is cited in the top fifteen of two different weblog ranking websites, www.truthlaidbear.com and www.daypop.com. These sites are all focused on US politics and range from conservative to leftist.

This project addresses the structure and content of these blogs and evaluates them according to their levels of interactivity and community engagement within and beyond the blogosphere. First, the research looks at the content, format, and structure of the sites, including the self-descriptions of the authors, and the posted site policies. Because most blogs publish a large volume of posts per day, only two weeks of actual content will be sampled on each blog, ranging from March 17 to March 31, 2003. This date range was chosen because it encompasses the March 20 US invasion of Iraq, an event of worldwide controversy and protest. The content of the blogs will be analyzed for shared discursive themes, use of mass media news, and explicit mentions of other blogs. These sites will be evaluated for user interactivity as well-while some blogs are completely in control of their primary author, others allow moderated or unmoderated posts from outside contributors. The structure and content of each blog will be analyzed for permanent and temporary links to other blogs, references to the blogging community, and user interactivity. The research will examine how these six popular blogs are situated within the larger Internet community, asking how community is defined on these sites. The content analysis described here is modeled on David Altheide's method of qualitative media analysis (1996). Altheide's method is especially appropriate to this study, allowing flexibility in coding while using constant comparative method to ensure reliability in analysis. The blog sites' structure will be critically studied as well, drawing upon Lawrence Lessig's concept of code, or the architecture of web sites (1999). For Lessig, coding will decide to what degree users have privacy, access, and the ability to engage in free speech with other users.

This research is significant in several respects: It brings attention to an understudied online medium, the web log, and highlights the community-building potential of this Internet phenomenon. Blogs provide a rich site of investigation for online culture, and the sites examined here are particularly noteworthy due to their popularity and diverse political stances. It is useful to study these blogs as elements of a growing group of online communities, and this research will argue that although they do not fully meet theoretical standards of community, these sites do exhibit a sense of membership, common interests, and shared purpose.



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Author(s): Alexander Halavais

Title: " Linking weblog neighborhoods: between ""small pieces"" and ""winner-take-all"" "

Abstract: Even by the time Plato expounded upon it in Phaedrus, the idea that "similarity begets friendship" was an old one. Weblogs are increasingly a venue through which individuals express their personal interests, and by which they identify their networks of online friends. One would expect that the networks of links among weblogs would provide further evidence of how similarity of thought and world leads to connection. We would expect the world of weblogs to appear to be (to borrow the title of a recent popular volume) "small pieces, loosely joined."

At the same time, recent discussions have demonstrated that the distribution of links (either in or out) adheres to a power law; that is, that there are a relatively small number of sites that receive a very large number of inbound links (for example) and a very large number that receive very few links. Rather than a distribution of small communities, a small number of "A-list" weblogs populate the link lists of a very broad part of the blogosphere. Rather than "small pieces, loosely joined," this appears to be "winner-take-all."

This contradiction between the perceived culture of weblogs and the observed network that connects them may be explained through a clarification of types of links. Links are clearly only a distant approximation of social ties. There is a significant difference between the unidirectional links to celebrity bloggers and the reciprocal links among friends and colleagues who blog. The latter may in some ways be an expression of personal opinions and attitudes (linking to a New York Times editorial that one likes, for example), rather than an indication of personal affinity.

The study described here takes both a quantitative and qualitative approach to examining the relationship between blog content and hyperlink structure. For each of a sample of 1200 English-language weblogs drawn from weblogs.com and appearing in the Technorati index, an index of reciprocal and non-reciprocal inbound and outbound links is constructed. The index page of each weblog and each of the weblogs that link to or from it is recorded, and the textual content of the sampled blog and its neighbors are compared, looking for the co-occurrence of words (cosine method). It is hypothesized that homophily is more prevalent among reciprocally linked pages than it is among unidirectionally linked pages.

The nature of these links is explored in further detail by coding a subset of 200 weblogs to determine the nature of their hyperlinks. The context of each link is coded for its apparent intent and utility, and these links are considered within the larger discursive context of each entry. Within this subset, the difference between permanent "blogroll" links and contextual linking within entries is compared. The latter type of link appears to contribute more toward unidirectional assertions of interest rather than reciprocal conversations. Those that appear within the context of blog entries also appear to be shared within the "neighborhood" of linked blogs. That is to say, birds of a feather link together.

By better understanding the nature of linking within the world of blogs, it is hoped that a clearer picture may be drawn of the macro-scale organization of blogs, and potentially of the wider web. The linking practices of weblogs, more than any other element of the genre, differentiate them from the rest of the Web. By better understanding these processes, we are better able to understand how the Web, hyperlink structures, and macrosocial dynamics are related.



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Author(s): Paul Hodkinson

Title: " Subcultural Blogging? Individual, Community and Communication "

Abstract: This paper addresses the increasing ubiquity of blogging as an online form of communication, through an examination of its rapid take-up and use by members of a long established music and style-based subculture. An initial observation of the properties of web logs may invite the conclusion that they offer a predominantly individualistic means of communication, something which rather contrasts with the emphasis upon community which has been discerned in previously dominant facilities such as Usenet groups and email lists (Baym 1995; Watson 1997). After all, in contrast to the collective emphasis and boundaries of public forums, the content of web logs revolves around the unrestricted and ever-developing concerns of the individual in question. Readers, meanwhile, appear to constitute individual visitors to a private space rather than equals within a clearly defined public community. Given such properties, might the growing popularity of blogging provide belated support for those who initially presented the internet as a catalyst for the increased prevalence of unbounded, multi-faceted individualised identities (Turkle 1995; Poster 1995)? Similarly, might such popularity reflect and hence add weight to the proclamations of Bauman, Beck and others, that society as a whole increasingly is defined by the detached, free-floating status of its members (Bauman, 2000; Beck-Gernsheim and Beck 2002)? An ideal case study through which to explore these possibilities is provided by the goth scene, a substantive and relatively clearly bounded music and fashion subculture, which long pre-existed the internet, but which is now heavily reliant upon online communications. Until recently, subcultural discussion forums were the predominant form of internet communication among goths, and there is little doubt that the clearly designated and communal nature of such virtual spaces reinforced and facilitated the cohesion and autonomy of the subculture. However, over the course of the last few years, goths have collectively migrated their communications away from such public forums, in favour of individual web logs on the Live Journal platform. Informed by a combination of participant observation and face to face interviews, this paper asks what happens to a substantive, clearly bounded subculture, when its members transfer to an online communications facility which apparently encourages an individualistic rather than a communal orientation. Drawing upon both observational and interview data, it will be suggested that although primarily organised around individuals rather than collective concerns, web log software offers significant potential for interaction and social networking via comments, search and linking facilities. As a consequence, although the software clearly does contain a bias towards the individual, it appears able to accommodate and facilitate substantive communities, at least in those cases where the latter are already established. This was demonstrated clearly in the case of goths, who in the course of transferring most of their communications onto the Live Journal platform, had utilised a combination of links, searches and comments facilities to connect their web logs together into a relatively coherent and autonomous sub-network. The content of each blog was indeed more individual-oriented and unconstrained than that of previously dominant goth discussion forums. Yet in spite of this, goths had carved out a relatively autonomous and highly interactive subcultural sphere on Live Journal - and one which was more intimately connected to goth content elsewhere on the internet than it was to non-subcultural content on the same platform. As well as offering important insights into the use and impacts of web logs on social identities in practice, the findings of the paper inform crucial debates about the extent to which technologies of communication shape and are shaped by their users.

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Author(s): Troels Johansson

Title: Internet Ubiquity in Cybernetic Geography: A Classification of Cyber-Places, or How the Internet Happened to Be Everywhere

Abstract: One of the most fascinating aspects of the Internet is the popular belief in its ubiquitous character; that the Internet "is" everywhere; globally and on every scale. From a pragmatic point of view, this belief is obviously easy to contest: There are places in the world where you cannot log on to the net, and there are people in the world who do not have access to the net in the same way as others. Still, rather than dismissing the Internet's ubiquitous nature as mere imagination, it is worth while asking in what respect we may speak of Internet ubiquity, and to which extend. Following Lyytinen and Yoo's definition of the notion of ubiquitous computing originally advanced by Weiser (i.e. high level of embeddedness, high level of mobility), this paper claims that the notion of Internet ubiquity could be taken to originate from an epistemological development which took place within geography rather than from the design oriented environments of which Weiser formed part. Following especially the proliferation of web-applications for geographic information systems, geographers began to speak of a virtual or cybernetic geography (cybergeography); concepts which came to designate a new field of study rather than a discipline as such, and which displayed a strong influence from information science and system theory. Most notably, the concept of "cyberplace" in British geographer Michael Batty's outline of a virtual geography suggested that geographers should think of the Internet as being "imbedded" in the material that they are studying (i.e. real places in the world) rather than simply something by which representations of this field of study may be distributed (i.e. geographical information). The concept of cyberplace may thus be seen as crucial for our understanding of Internet ubiquity. This presentation performs an epistemological analysis of the concept of cyberplace and assesses its importance to similar concepts outside the field of geography. Secondly the paper seeks to try out the practical applicability of the concept by means of a categorization of a number of popular cases, which traditionally have been understood as examples of Internet ubiquity. This part of the work tries to characterize cyberplaces in terms of technology, scale, and context.

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Author(s): Lena Karlsson

Title: ""It's like a little book club of sorts except it's an online journal club": Acts of Reading Online Diaries "

Abstract: Online journals, or weblogs of the diary kind, form a significant part of what Murray has called "the global autobiography project of the Web" (p. 252). Recent studies have shown that within the weblog genre, weblogs of the diary kind dominate numerically (Herring et al). However, critical attention has mostly been paid to weblogs of the filter variety where the focus is on external events, not on the everyday narration of self in diary format (Herring et al). Few autobiography scholars have studied online journals, a fact which is curious bearing in mind the intense interest in autobiography studies in the past three decades among feminist and postmodernist literary scholars in particular, and the resultant broadening understanding of what constitutes an autobiographical subject and an autobiographical act. Phillipe Lejeune's as yet untranslated book-length study of online diaries, "Cher écran…" and the Biography special issue on online lives constitute important exceptions. This paper is part of a larger case study of a cluster of female Chinese American online diarists who present large-scale autobiographical writing. Some of them have published journal entries almost daily for the past four years. The focus of the current paper, however, is not on the narration of self in online journals, but on the consumption of online journals and the formation of communities around life-writing texts. On some level, self-writing always has an audience in mind, real or imagined, that "hovers at the edge of the page," to use Lynn Bloom's expression (p. 23). If this is then true of all autobiographical acts, it becomes intensely immediate in a Web context where the site of production and consumption of autobiographical tales is so closely connected, where most readers literally hover at the edge of the page. Yet, visitors of these diary sites view themselves as readers, not as participants, even if the reading encouraged is a participatory one (via tools such as guestbooks, comments sections, mail-to-links). This is a machine-enabled autobiographical situation where the acts of reading and writing a life are closely connected. Three of these journal sites are currently being surveyed to get an understanding of readers' (both lurkers and active readers) relation to the autobiographical texts. Why do they read these autobiographical texts - often relating rather mundane events in the lives of the online journalist? How and when do they read them? Do readers feel that their presence makes an impact? What kind of connection do they feel with the diarist herself and with other readers? In their genre analysis of weblogs, Herring et al. (2004) paint a rather dichotomous picture when they describe filter-styles weblogs as highly interactive and online journals as individualistic, rather static and non-interactive, "vehicle[s] for self-expression and self-empowerment" (p. 1). This is a picture I do not recognize and that my preliminary empirical findings do not support. The online diary's interactive capabilities has allowed for communities to be formed around life-writing texts, an instance when cyberspace indeed generates a new form of social interaction. References Biography special issue "online lives," Biography, vol. 26:1 (Winter 2003). Bloom, Lynn Z. "'I write for Myself and Strangers': Private Diaries as Public Documents." In Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women's Diaries, edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1996. 23-37. Herring, Susan et al. "Bridging the Gap: a Genre Analysis of Weblogs," Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'04). Available online at: http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2004/2056/04/205640101b.pdf Lejeunne, Phillipe."Cher écran …": Journal Personnel, Ordinateur, Internet. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free Press, 1997.

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Author(s): Carolyn R. Miller, Dawn Shepherd

Title: "The Ubiquity of the Blog: A Genre Analysis "

Abstract: Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg commented in late 2001 that "'blog' is clearly a word whose time has come" (Nunberg 2001). Since then there has been a flood of blogs and of commentary and discussion about blogs. A search of the Lexis-Nexis database shows the first press mention in 1998, and by 2002 over five hundred articles referencing blogs. A 2003 survey found that new blogs on eight popular blog hosting sites increased by more than six hundred percent between 2000 and 2001, with over four million blogs by the time of the survey and 10 million projected by the end of 2004 (Henning 2003). Blogs have a strong claim to ubiquity, and it's worth it to ask why. What is it about this form of internet discourse that has been so compelling to so many? We propose an answer to this question deriving from rhetorical analysis. A cultural approach to rhetoric suggests that when a type of discourse or communicative action acquires a common name within a given context or community, that's a good sign that it's functioning as a genre (Miller 1984). In other words, ubiquity provides a strong presumption that a rhetorical type functions as a genre. Genre analysis points us to questions about exigence and motive, relationships between form and function, and the evolution of cultural communicative practices over time. The blog is a new rhetorical opportunity, made possible by technology that is becoming more available and easier to use, but it was adopted so quickly and widely that it seems to serve well-established rhetorical needs. Why did blogging catch on so quickly and so widely? What motivates someone to begin--and continue--a blog? What audience(s) do bloggers address? Who actually reads blogs and why? In short, what rhetorical work do blogs perform--and for whom? And how do blogs perform this work? What features and elements make the blog recognizable and functional? Our analysis first examines the cultural moment in which the blog arose and caught on, then characterizes the substantive-semantic, structural-syntactic, and rhetorical-pragmatic features of the blog, surveys the ancestral genres of the blog and their influences on it, and finally discusses the generic rhetorical exigence that seems to motivate blogs. To conduct the analysis, we examine blogs available on major hosting sites, the evaluative criteria generated within blogging communities, and the lively commentary by bloggers on blogging. Genre analysis has become important in understanding the discourse of the disciplines and the workplace, relatively structured arenas of social interaction in which, as Berkenkotter and Huckin note, "Genres are the intellectual scaffolds on which community-based knowledge is constructed" (1995). So far, however, genre analysis has been applied to digital communication in only a preliminary way (Agre, 1998; Dillon & Gushrowski, 2000; Zucchermaglio & Talamo, 2003). Our analysis will take a next step in this direction, focusing our attention on the relatively unstructured rhetorical environment of the internet where constructing knowledge and getting work done aren't necessarily the driving exigences. A genre analysis of the blog will thus reveal something about the emergent culture of the early 21st century--the self-organized communities that support blogging, the rhetorical exigences that arise in them, and the rhetorical roles (or "subject positions") they support and make possible. Works Cited Agre, Philip E. 1998. "Designing Genres for New Media: Social, Economic, and Political Contexts." In Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, edited by S. G. Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 69-99. Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T. N. (1995). Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/Power. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Dillon, A., and B. A. Gushrowski. 2000. "Genres and the Web: Is the Personal Home Page the First Uniquely Digital Genre?" Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51 (2):202-205. Henning, J. (2003, 4 October). The Blogging Iceberg [website]. Perseus Development Company. Retrieved 4 January, 2004, from the World Wide Web: http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/thebloggingiceberg.html Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as Social Action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70, 151-176. Nunberg, G. (2001). I Have Seen the Future, and It Blogs [website]. Stanford University Center for the Study of Language and Information. Retrieved 28 May, 2003, from the World Wide Web: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/%7Enunberg/blog.html Zucchermaglio, C., & Talamo, A. (2003). The Development of a Virtual Community of Practices Using Electronic Mail and Communicative Genres. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 17(3), 259-284.

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Author(s): Christine Ogan, Kursat Cagiltay

Title: " Confession, Revelation and Story telling: Patterns of Use on a Popular Turkish Web Site"

Abstract: This paper is a study of the users of Itiraf.com, a website based in Istanbul Turkey. The authors conducted a web survey of the 40-60,000 users who visit the site each day in July and August 2003. The survey takes a uses and gratifications theoretical approach to the study of this web community to determine why the readers and contributors to this web site return so regularly and the uses they make of the site. Uses and gratifications is a mass communications-based theory that is increasingly used to understand web site user behavior. Since we have very limited information on Turkish Internet users in general, the survey of 4,531 respondents (a very large response rate for a web survey) also serves to provide a partial profile all Internet users in Turkey as well as a profile of the Itiraf.com users in particular. Comparisons are made to previously collected data on national samples of Turkish users as well as to studies that profile U.S. users. The study adds to the body of knowledge that applies uses and gratifications theory to Internet use. Itiraf is the Turkish word for confession, but the submissions to the site are more than that. Some are actual confessions-of infidelity, theft, jealousy and other matters the submitter expresses shame for having done. But much of the content actually does not fall into that category. The rest of the stories tell of sexual and platonic relationships, family relationships, interesting experiences, embarrassing incidents, or perhaps even made up stories-though the editor of the site claims that all published "confessions" actually happened. Ersan Ozer, creator of itiraf.com, noticed that television audiences were attracted to programs in which celebrities told their personal stories and thought that stories of the everyday lives of non-celebrities would be just as interesting to Internet users. Factor analysis and multiple regression were used to analyze the data. The study finds that Social Interaction motivations were the main reasons for using itiraf.com for reading others' confessions, writing confessions and comments and meeting people found on the site, while Diversion was a prominent motivation for reading other people's confessions. None of the demographic variables predicted the use of the site in any important way. However, being younger and having less education were significant in the regression predicting the frequency of visiting the site for the respondents who completed this survey from outside Turkey. And those international respondents who were female and younger were more likely to submit confessions to the site. Other patterns also emerged from the data in which these were the main findings. Several frames for understanding the uses and gratifications for the popularity of this confession web site are described in this paper. They relate to the lack of a practice of confession in the Turkish religious experience, the recent popularity of reality media, and the society's move toward an individualistic society and away from a collectivistic society. Motivations for use of this web site are similar to those found in some U.S.-based research.

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Author(s): Gregor Petric

Title: "Personal web site in the context of late(post) modernity "

Abstract: Each internet user with a set of relatively undemanding competences can produce his own web site and publish it to satisfy his specific social needs. To better understand this widespread and diverse activity, which is largely reduced to the genre of personal homepages and weblogs in the scientific literature, we propose two theoretical backgrounds, one leaning on the idea of late modernity and second on that of post modernity. This way we can assess the activity of users on the internet in the context of everyday life's social circumstances. It is supposed that contemporary social conditions strongly influence everyday conduct and specifically the activities of individuals on the internet. According to two different conceptions of relation between an individual and society, two understanding of personal web site use are put forward. Giddens' late modern individual actively copes with risky social conditions in order to restore a coherent self-identity, while Bauman's postmodern individual passively retreats from them in temporal identity games. Correspondingly late modern individual uses his personal web site to (re)establish personal relationships with other users of internet on the basis of common interests, beliefs and values and the postmodern individual uses his personal web site for experimenting with his social identity. The lack of encountering social spaces, the individual choice of personal relations, the lifting of relations from traditional anchorages are important structural conditions of late modernity. On the individual level, correspondingly, specific factors - the crisis of identity, loneliness and physical incompetence - result in intentions to produce a personal web site to satisfy society induced social needs. A personal web site is not a platform to develop a full personal relationship, but only to initiate or enrich a certain relationship. The conduct of postmodern individual is structured by contemporary consumerist system, which is providing a path for increasing narcissism. Narcissist individuals are not able to deal healthy with their social environment, they perceive it primarily through the lenses of self-interest. The body is the center of social activity and personal web site offers an innovative place of experimenting with it. The extent of control that an individual has over his self-presentation through his personal web site stimulates experimentation that results in production of idealized self, which offers its author temporal satisfactions. While the late modern author of a personal web site uses it to establish long-term relationships, even intimate, the postmodern stroller builds it only to play around and usually abandons it quickly. The paper not only builds a theoretical framework for understanding the production and usage of personal web sites, but puts an equal interest in methodological and empirical part. In the methodological framework two explanatory models are presented - one for establishing personal web site for interpersonal relations and the second for experimenting with self-identity. Operationalisations follow explicit definitions of concepts. The data were collected in the form of web survey in June 2002. The proposed concepts of personal web site use prove to be empirically valid on a sample of more than 1000 authors of personal web sites. Using a linear structural equation modeling approach, it can be shown that the theoretical models have some explanatory power. The data supports the idea that internet activities are strongly entrenched in the context of everyday life, which is structured by various contemporary social conditions.

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Author(s): Lois Scheidt

Title: Addressing the Unseen: The Audience Envisioned for Adolescent Diary Weblogs

Abstract: Dairies have traditionally been used "as a spiritual exercise, personal therapy tool, and literary production" (Mcneill, 2003, p. 29). As one example of "life-writing" (Coleman, 2000), dairies have created evocative pictures of people, their lives, their times, and the culture that surrounded them. While there is much variance between examples, most dairies display such trademark features as dated entries focusing on the diarist's experiences and interests, tone that can run from confidential to confessional, and a concern with the everyday details of the writers own life (Mcneill, 2003, p. 45).

These features have been transitioned to the diaries' online descendent, the weblog (blog). Significant numbers of adolescents have adapted the personal diary to this new format. In their genre analysis of weblogs Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, and Wright (2004) found that teenagers made up 40% of the 203 weblogs analyzed with female accounting for 58% of the teenager weblogs. LiveJournal.com (2003), only one of many sites where adolescents can build diary weblogs, publishes daily user statistics. In their December 19, 2003 statistics they cite 699,704 users, of these 257,050 are between the ages of 13 and 18, 36.7% of total users. LiveJournal.com statistics do not separate age groups by gender, of those users specifying a gender (1,251,689), 63.5% are female and 36.5% are male.

The picture of weblogs as online dairies, often written by women, has not been part of the popular construction of the genre. In their article "Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs," Herring, Kouper, Scheidt, and Wright (under review) found, in a semi-random sample of popular press articles, that male bloggers are mentioned more then females - 88% to 12%, and 93 of the 94 males mentioned were adults, one adolescent male blogger was mentioned. While one published article (Orlowski, 2003) asserts that teenage girls make up the majority of bloggers. Herring et al. (under review) found that the numbers of teenage female bloggers slightly exceeds the numbers of adult male bloggers, with female teenagers dominating the 'personal journal' category.

Unlike the paper-based adolescent diary of previous generations that primarily served as personal archives, in monologue, for thoughts and daily activities, blogs are publicly accessible spaces where adolescents can target their words to a variety of different external audiences in spaces that allow the writer to develop active dialogues with their audience.

In these spaces the "time-worn assumptions that the diary is kept only for the diarist and that it is an intensively secretive and private enterprise are unworkable" (Bunkers, 2001). Mcneill (2003, p. 26) notes "Given the conventional understanding of the diary as a private form, a public online journal seems to many people an abomination, or at least a contradiction in terms". The invited gaze of the audience displaces the boundaries of the private (Gill, 2001, p. 83).

By inviting the audience's gaze the diarist becomes a conscious communicator shaping the diary into a version of the story of a life (Fothergill, 1974). But inviting the gaze of the audience does not necessarily invite the view of random web surfers who stumble onto the diary blog site. Some interfaces allow bloggers to password protect their sites, thereby limiting access from the general public to only those privileged few granted knowledge of the password. The ability to limit to only the specific readers the diarists wishes to allow into their writings distinguishes the online from the paper-based diary where protection was often only as strong as the leather clasp connected to the gold lock waiting for the hand that held the scissors (Bunkers, 2001, p. 4 & 32). However the very nature of limited access to password protected diary weblogs limits this papers consideration to publicly accessible diary weblogs.

What makes an audience read a diary weblog? At their best diaries are stories, though without the requirement of a coherent continued plotline (Bunkers, 2001). Anthropologists have shown that people prefer and remember chronological narratives with a clear structure (Bird, 2003), weblogs with their chronological framing and technologically mediated structures may meet this criteria. Additionally the ability for the audience to participate in the development of the story through interaction (Bird, 2003) may also add to the appeal of the medium. But this discussion moves from the private dairy constructed by the writer for their own purposes to the use of that material by an audience outside the writer, and potentially unknown to them. Who are the audiences envisioned by the writers of accessible online diaries?

Clues to their idealized or known audiences can be found in the narratives the diarists' create. Langellier (1998, p. 210) postulates five types of audiences for narrative performances, audience as: witnesses to the experiences reported upon in the story, therapists and emotional supporters of the storyteller, cultural critics commenting on the events that produced the story, narrative analysts of the systems of discourse embedded in the narrative, and passive observer. This paper looks at the types of adolescent diary blogs currently posted on the web and qualitatively applies Langellier's five definitions of audience to the implied and explicit audiences of adolescent diary blogs.

Examples used in this paper are drawn from weblogs categorized under Blog Search Engine's (http://www.blogsearchengine.com/ ) "Teen Blog" or from the corpus of blogs randomly gathered from blo.gs (http://blo.gs/ ) for use by the Blog Research on Genre (BROG) Project at Indiana University, of which the author is a member. The role of excisor[1] (Bunkers, 2003) looms large in a project such as this; primacy has been placed on the selection of text that illustrate Langellier's types of audience. However in making these selections visual and textual elements that create the whole cloth of which the weblog is woven are lost, much as Bunkers (2001, p. 32) implores her readers "remember that no excerpt from a diarist's work is intended to represent either an entire diary or an entire life."

One issue becomes immediately problematic in that Langellier's types of audience are primarily developed to address the dialectic between the performance as a single entity and the audience for that entity. This perspective is missing the unique character of group blogs, where the primary explicit audience is the bloggers themselves. In this case, while the blog may be organized around a topic the primary goal of the writing is group cohesion.

Reference List
Bird, S. E. (2003). The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World. New York: Routledge.

Bunkers, S. L. (2001). Introduction. In S. L. Bunkers (Ed.), Diaries of Girls and Women: A Midwestern American Sampler (pp. 3-40). Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Bunkers, S. L. (2003). Whose Diary Is It, Anyway? Issues of Agency, Authority, Ownership. A/B: Auto/Biography Studies, 17, 11-27.

Coleman, P. (2000). Introduction: Life-writing and the legitimation of the modern self. In P. Coleman, J. Lewis, & J. Kowalik (Eds.), Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism (pp. 1-15). Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.

Fothergill, R. (1974). Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries. London: Oxford University Press.

Gill, J. (2001). Someone Else's Misfortunes: The Vicarious Pleasures of the Confessional Text. Journal of Popular Culture, 35, 81-94.

Herring, S. C., Kouper, I., Scheidt, L. A., & Wright, E. (under review). Women and Children Last: The Discourse Construction of Weblogs.

Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. (2004). Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs. In Proceedings of the Thirty-seventh Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-37) (Ed.), Los Alamitos: IEEE Press.

Langellier, K. M. (1998). Voiceless bodies, bodiless voices: The future of personal narrative performance. In S. J. Dailey (Ed.), The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions (pp. 207-213). Washington DC: National Communication Association.

LiveJournal.com Statistics (2003). LiveJournal.com [On-line]. Available: http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml

Mcneill, L. (2003). Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet. Biography: And Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 26, 24-48.

Orlowski, Andrew (2003, May 30). Most bloggers 'are teenage girls' - survey. The Register

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Author(s): K.D. Trammell, Justyna Hofmokl, Alek Tarkowski

Title: Rzeczpospolita blogów: Identifying the uses & gratifications of Polish bloggers

Abstract: Weblogs, or blogs, are online journals where the content is arranged in reversed chronological order (Blood, 2002; Walker, 2005). Blogs have been noted to dethrone major politicians (Shachtman, 2002; Williams & Trammell, 2003), raise others from obscurity to popular fame (Ratan, 2003), and serve as an "unedited, published voice of the people" (Winer, 2003). Scholarship on understanding blogs and the implications of blogged content is underway, yet relies mostly on blogs published in English. This study attempts to not only answer new questions about the motivations of bloggers, but does so in the untapped space of Polish bloggers and their blogs. Using the theoretical perspective of uses and gratifications, this study will seek the motivations of Polish bloggers. Uses and gratifications (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1974; McQuail, Blumler, and Brown, 1972) provides a framework covering "a broad variance of media effects including knowledge, dependency, attitudes, perceptions of social reality, agenda setting, discussion, and politics" (Ruggerio, 2000, p. 25). Uses and gratifications is designed to get at the needs a particular mass medium provides its users (Blumler & Katz, 1974). As such, the media user's motivations and gratifications are key. Rubin (1993) asserts that the cornerstone of the theory is that audiences are active and that to understand effects scholars must explain motivations and behaviors. The theoretical perspective assumes an active and goal-directed audience seeking out particular media to gratify informational, social, and psychological needs (Rubin, 1994). The theory has been used to investigate both perceived motivations through content analysis and actual motivations through surveys (Kaye & Johnson, 2000; Papacharissi, 2002a, 2002b, 2003). Motivations for media selection include diversion, surveillance, social utility, and personal identification (Ruggerio, 2000). Papacharissi (2003) discovered social utility to be at the heart of the perceived gratifications for English-language bloggers. Her content analysis of 150 registered, public online journal blogs hosted at Blogger.com suggest that the posts were intended to be read by friends or family. While this provides an understanding of the motivations behind English-language blogs, little is known about Polish-language blogs. Demographic data collected in Poland by other researchers is only preliminary and does not provide the richness needed to understand the actual motivations of blogging. In Poland, there are 6.75 million estimated Internet users (SMG/KRC, 2003) and more than 150,000 registered blogs. Polish blogs started appearing on the cyberlandscape around 2000 and therefore gained popularity relatively early in the history of the medium, which had very limited reach until around 1997-1999. Finally, Polish blogs are possibly the fourth biggest language group in the world (Blog Census, 2003). Therefore, the ubiquitous nature of blogging in Poland is unlike that in other nations. Due to these factors we can expect blogs to play a different, and possibly prominent, role in the Polish online space. We consider blogs not only an interesting media form in themselves, but most of all one that is most often chosen by Polish Internet users seeking means of self-expression. The methodology employed in this study is a quantitative content analysis of Polish blogs using an expanded version of Papacharissi's (2003) code sheet. As such, this study will provide an exploratory understanding of 1). the motivations for Polish Internet users to blog, 2). the aspects of blogging that make the medium attractive to Polish bloggers, and 3). the patterns in perceived motivation. Additionally, this research will determine the extent to which Polish blogs are different from blogs written in other native languages (in the selection of subjects, form, demography). Finally, this research seeks to identify possible correlations with other self-expressing activities, such as managing a personal Web site or life outside of the Internet. This study will provide insight into a different type of blogger not yet explored. By providing basic data about Polish bloggers and the characteristics and motivations behind blogging in Poland, this study provides an empirical data helpful in understanding use of the medium. Data gathered will also be used to conduct a comparative analysis, using similar research of North American blogging behavior. Data is currently being analyzed.

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Author(s): Kaye Trammell, Richard Ferdig

Title: Blogging from a Pedagogical Perspective

Abstract: As technology advances and more Internet tools become ubiquitous, educators look with excitement to utilizing technology in the classroom. In recent years, students have experienced learning in virtual activities such as bulletin boards, using the Internet to conduct research, and communicating with people from geographically dispersed locations. Backed by Vygotsky's social constructivist framework, weblogs, or blogs, offer instructors a way to increase collaboration in the classroom. This paper provides the pedagodical argument for implementing blogs into the curriculum as a learning tool.

Blogs are Web pages often likened to online journals (Blood, 2002; Winer, 2003; Walker, 2005). Blogs are recognized as Web pages that have dated posts that are arranged in reverse chronological order (Blood, 2002; Winer, 2003; Walker, 2005). Even so, there is a lot to know about blogging beyond the technical definition.

Blogs are both similar and dissimilar from other technology tools used in the classroom. In some ways, blogs can be likened to Web pages, online discussion forums, etc. As such, blogs are similar in that they are a) computer-mediated, b) published messages, c) that occur asynchronously, d) to be shared with an unknown public/audience. Even so, blogs are not just Web pages, nor do they perform the same function that online bulletin board system.

There is currently little academic scholarship on the blogs, let alone how blogs might be useful as a prospective learning tool. Even so, previous research on online learning and collaboration in education provide an excellent framework for understanding how blogs can be harnessed within the classroom.

The work of Lev Vygotsky provides a theoretical framework in support of what blogging can add to the academic environment. Vygotskyis credited with developing a social constructivist approach to understanding learning and education, is said to have began his research journey in an attempt to help us better understand what it is to be human and improve our human situation (Wells). Although Vygotsky did not reach this goal, his ideas laid the groundwork for challenging traditional "recitation script" classroom learning (Tharp & Gallimore; Wells). Using Vygotsky's constructs, teachers are able to move beyond the memorization exercises of learning and create an environment more conducive to the learning process.

Vygotsky saw learning as a social interaction between the student and the teacher. Using the Zone of Proximal Development he created, Vygotsky hypothesized that there are two zones that teachers must work with to encourage learning. First, there is the zone of what the student has the potential to learn on his own. The second zone encompasses all that the student can learn with the assistance of a teacher. According to Vygotsky, these zones bridge the gap between what is known and what can be known; this is where learning occurs. Therefore, what a student can learn by collaborating with a teacher is much greater than what he could have learned/accomplished on his own.

As educators begin to incorporate electronic and interactive elements in their classrooms, Vygotsky's ideas become more feasible. Additionally, the need to incorporate these concepts become more important and central to ensuring that learning is occurring. Wells suggested that teachers could think about learning and teaching by a) seeing the classroom as a collaborative community, by b) creating purposeful activities that c) allow for diversity, originality, and are d) situated and unique.

For Vygotsky, the idea that collaboration facilitates learning is key. When students blog assignments, reactions, or real-world applications to what they are doing in the classroom, then students have the ability to learn from each other (creating a collaborative community in the classroom). By this, student bloggers are able to share their ideas and news on their blog. Other students will read the blog posts and learn something. Often, when comments are available, students will even leave comments for one another furthering the learning and sharing process. This illustrates the cycle where the student blogger becomes the teacher in sharing knowledge and the blog reader becomes the student. Then, in the comment section, the roles reverse again where the reader has the ability to provide feedback as a teacher would and point out other relevant information. This interaction encourages more a deeper learning where the student is able to transcend what he could have only learned on his own in zone 1 to what he learned as the result of collaboration in zone 2 (Vygotsky; Wells).

Based on Vygotsky's principles, blogging appears to be another worth-while educational tool. Even so, blogging is only as good as the teachers and students make it. There is much to be learned by educators about how to properly implement blogs and what benefits they can serve. Regardless though, blogs create interesting opportunities for self-reflexive learning for students of any age.



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Author(s): Jill Walker

Title: Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks

Abstract: Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks

A new kind of narrative is emerging from the network: the distributed narrative. Distributed narratives don't bring media together to make a total artwork. Distributed narratives explode the work altogether, sending fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in. This paper explores this new narrative trend, looking at how narrative is spun across the network and into our lives. I will trace stories told across weblogs, looking at the possibly fictional She's A Flight Risk, the authentic Bagdad Blogger and the proven hoax Kaycee Nicole. This networked distribution will be compared to a physically distributed narrative, Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg's sticker novel Implementation.

The endless hypertext has been a spectre of new media for over a decade, feared by some and sought after by others. Today's "book without end" is not a single website but rather an interlaced patchwork of narrative traces across medias and genres: distributed narrative.

The term distributed narrative is inspired by distributed computing, which spreads processing across many computers, attaining as much or more power than is possible in a single supercomputer. The immersive game Cloudmakers used the tagline "distributed biological processing" to characterise the ways in which thousands of players participated in solving the puzzles of the game. A distributed narrative, then, is a narrative that instead of trying to gather itself into one "whole" structure spreads its story across many spaces, both virtual and physical.

Distributed narratives can be literally distributed, as in Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg's Implementation: A Novel, where readers are asked to post stickers printed with fragments of the narrative in their surroundings. From a traditional point of view, the pages of pristine stickers, before they are stuck on sign posts and toilet doors, constitute the work. Or perhaps the website would be viewed as the work, with its photos of pasted stickers. Such a view disregards the expansive ambitions of this narrative. Fittingly for a story about "psychological warfare, American imperialism, sex, terror, identity, and the idea of place", Implementation not only seeks to be read, it asks its readers to colonise the world with, to paste its fragments everywhere, inserting it into their everyday lives and spaces. Although the authors publish selected photos of pasted stickers on their website, ultimately they surrender control of how their work spreads and is pasted in new contexts giving new meanings.

Tim Etchell's Surrender Control is the title of another distributed narrative that merges digital space with the reality of the reader. The reader of this piece received SMSes over the course of 72 hours instructing her to do many strange things, thereby spreading the narrative into her physical surroundings. Invitations to sign up were both advertised on the web and distributed on unsigned fliers in London, combining physical and networked space much as Implementation does.

Another way in which narrative can be distributed access media is by combining it with textual performance, as when Isabella V., the possibly fictional protagonist of

She's A Flight Risk, steps outside of her weblog to ping her readers in iChat or to participate in interviews. Kaycee Nicole, the famously fictional teenaged web diarist who "died" of leukemia in 2002, presents a parallel example of a distributed narrative. "Kaycee" participated in chats and email conversations in addition to writing frequent diary entries at her website. Both fictional and non-fictional weblogs tend to have narratives spun across sites, through comments in other blogs, mentions elsewhere, participation in discussion sites and chats, and sometimes interviews and the like. These are personal, distributed stories, stories for a new time.

Immersive gaming, sometimes called unfiction or pervasive gaming, is a related phenomenon, however there is a distinct difference: distributed narratives don't expect the reader to play along, they expect the reader to distribute the narrative, virus-like, a narrative meme. One might also compare distributed narratives to similar attempts to release art from the "work" or from the white or black cube of the gallery or theatre in the visual and performative arts. Literature and narrative have been slower than these art forms to explode the shackles of the work, and it appears that the ubiquity of the network has been a driving force in this.

Distributed narratives demand more from their readers than reading or suspension of disbelief. They ask to be taken up, passed on, distributed. They seek to be viral, the memes of narrative, looking for readers who will be carriers as well as interpreters.

In the evening it was back into town where Anna Martinson, fellow IU SLIS PhD student - in her case PhD Candidate, and I dined with a gathering of women scholars at Terre a' Terre. The restaurant has been voted the best vegetarian restaurant in Britain. Of course I can't comment on the award as I have not eaten in all of the vegetarian restaurants in Britain, but this was a very very good restaurant…probably one of the best I have visited. The presentation was so pretty that the food was almost to attractive to eat. Oh and they sell Australian Port too, always a good thing for my ranking system. It got to be amusing as each new party that entered the restaurant was from our conference. I'll make a bet that 70% of the people they served that night were internet researchers.

Posted by prolurkr at September 21, 2004 11:50 PM

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