Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary?

TLDR

Blogging is a Web-based form of communication that is rapidly becoming mainstream. The study reports ethnographic findings on small, limited‑audience blogs and proposes design recommendations for blogging software. The authors conducted an ethnographic analysis of motivations, social interactivity, and audience relationships in the studied blogs. The study revealed insights into motivations and interactivity of small blogs, leading to design recommendations for blogging software.

Abstract

Blogging is a Web-based form of communication that is rapidly becoming mainstream. In this paper, we report the results of an ethnographic study of blogging, focusing on blogs written by individuals or small groups, with limited audiences. We discuss motivations for blogging, the quality of social interactivity that characterized the blogs we studied, and relationships to the blogger's audience. We consider the way bloggers related to the known audience of their personal social networks as well as the wider blogosphere of unknown readers. We then make design recommendations for blogging software based on these findings.