Laura Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman. “Introduction: Weblogs, Rhetoric, Community, and Culture.” Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. Ed. Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman. June 2004. 6 Nov. 2005 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/introduction.html.
On the possibility of blogs’ affects:
Enthusiasts claim that blogs allow anyone’s voice to be heard and resist hierarchical modes of information dissemination and communication. While this idealist egalitarian model of the Internet has often been criticized, we find value in the power of blogs to forego the institutionalization of communicative practices and offer spaces for writing that are more collaboratively constructed than other online spaces, as bloggers freely link to, comment on, and augment each other’s content. In this way, blogs allow for the possibility of developing new cultural practices of online communication in relation to previously established modes of ownership, authorship, and legitimacy of content and access to information.
Definition of blog or
At this point in their development, blogs are best described as web sites that are updated frequently, most often with links to other sites and commentary on the other sites’ content. The content of blogs combine musings, memories, jokes, reflections on research, photographs, rants, and essays, though we would argue that it is not the nature of the content that defines it. Blogs can be devoted to only one topic, or they can reflect what the author is interested in at any given time. They can have one author—authors of blogs are known as “bloggers“—or multiple authors. What characterizes blogs are their form and function: all posts to the blog are time-stamped with the most recent post at the top, creating a reverse chronological structure governed by spontaneity and novelty.
Resources to check out:
Bausch, P., Haughey, M., & Hourihan, M. (2002). We blog: Publishing online with weblogs. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing.
Turnbull, G. (2002). The state of the blog part I: Blogger past. In J. Rodzilla (Ed.), We’ve got blog: How weblogs are changing our culture. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.
