The role of the author in topical blogs

Authors:
Scott Carter
Affiliations:
University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
Venue:
CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2005

Citing 5
Cited 4

Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society

Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society
Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs

HICSS '04 Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'04) - Track 4 - Volume 4
Blogging by the rest of us

CHI '04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Interviewing over instant messaging

CHI '04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary?

CSCW '04 Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work

On context of content: a comparative methodology review of how HCI and mass communication analyze blogs and social media

CHI '07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Playground games: a design strategy for supporting and understanding coordinated activity

Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems
Weblog as a personal thinking space

Proceedings of the 20th ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia
A blog considered from the perspectives of social practice theory

Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Companion

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Web logs, or blogs, challenge the notion of authorship. Seemingly, rather than a model in which the author's writings are themselves a contribution, the blog author weaves a tapestry of links, quotations, and references amongst generated content. In this paper, I present a study of the role of the author plays in the construction of topical blogs, in particular focusing on how blog authors make decisions about what to post and how they judge the quality of posts. To this end, I analyzed the blogs and blogging habits of eight participants using a quantitative analysis tool that I developed, a diary study, and interviews with each participant. Results suggest that authors of topical blogs often do not create new content but strive to, often follow journalistic conventions, use the content of their blogs as a reference tool for other work practices, and are connected as a community by a set of source documents. Results also show that Instant Messaging is useful as an interview medium when questions center around online content.