Politics as Usual in the Blogosphere

Abstract

In recent years, the emergence of weblogs, commonly known as blogs, are changing the way that people interact over the Internet. Two particular kinds of blogs have become particularly popular—political and personal/hobby oriented blogs. Each of these types of blogs foster a community of readers and writers. In this paper, we investigate how the notion of community is expressed through these two blog genres. We examine the differences between community aspects in political and personal blogs. We focus on four dimensions that are associated with community: activism, reputation, social connectedness and identity. Our results, based on a multilingual worldwide blogging survey of 121 political and 593 personal/hobby bloggers from four continents show significant di fferences in blogging practices across these genres.