Bamblog

Achtung - das Bamblog wird seit Mitte Oktober 2007 nicht mehr aktualisiert. Bitte besuchen Sie mein neues Weblog unter http://www.schmidtmitdete.de. Danke! - Please note that this blog is no longer active. You can find my new blog at http://www.schmidtmitdete.de. Thanks for visiting!

Just noticed that there has been an update of the GOR 2006 Conference Website. Registration is open, and they added the presentation titles and authors. Almost 140, and a wide variety of topics. Unfortunately, our session on "social software" didn’t make the cut, but I see a number of familiar names anyway..

I’m going to present some findings from the "Wie ich blogge?!"-survey, below is my abstract. See you in Bielefeld!

Weblogs as tool for online-based networking: Empirical findings for the german-speaking blogosphere

Within the last years, Weblogs and the fast-growing Blogosphere as a whole have gained increasing attention. Scientific and journalistic discourse is mainly focused on the consequences and challenges of this new genre of CMC for public communication: Are Weblogs a tool for „citizen journalism“ which will replace, complement or  rather not affect traditional journalism? What impact do Weblogs have on political communication in election campaigns? Are there ways to assess quality and relevance of blog-based communication? While these are important questions, looking at Weblogs from a perspective of public communication alone will miss a relevant point: Most Bloggers see their Weblog not as a tool for publishing texts to a general and disperse audience, but as a tool for connecting with friends and family and reaching out to people who share their interests.

For the US, several studies have demonstrated that this biased perspective is due to the fact that most observers focus on a relatively few number of Weblogs (those with the highest visibility based on a lot of incoming links), while the majority of Weblogs are of a „personal journal“ type rather than „Filter Blogs“ or „Knowledge Blogs“ (e.g. Gumbrecht 2004, Herring et. al. 2004a, Herring et.al. 2004b).

Up to now, no similar studies exist for Weblogs in German-speaking countris. The paper will fill this research gap by presenting findings from a broad online-based study („Wie ich blogge?! Die Weblog-Umfrage 2005“) conducted in cooperation with the major Blog Hosters blogg.de, blog.de and twoday.net. Special focus will be on three topics:

• What are the sociodemographic characteristics of bloggers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland?
• Which audience (scale and composition) is addressed by their Weblogs?
• How do bloggers present their identity online, how do they manage the tension between privacy and publicness?

Based on these empirical findings it will be argued that Weblogs should be conceptualized as tools for online-based networking, the use for journalistic or political purposes being only a subset of a wide array of practices.

References

Herring, Susan / Inna Kouper / Lois Ann Scheidt / Elijah Wright (2004b): Women and children last: The discursive construction of weblogs. In: Gurak, Laura / Smiljana Antonijevic / Laurie Johnson / Clancy Ratliff / Jessica Reyman (Hg.): Into the Blogosphere. Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. Online-Publication: blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html.

Herring, Susan/Lois Scheidt/Sabrina Bonus/Elijah Wright (2004a): Bridging the Gap. A genre analysis of Weblogs. Paper presented at the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Available online: www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/classes/ics234cw04/herring.pdf.

Gumbrecht, Michelle (2004): Blogs as „Protected Space“. Paper presented at the World Wide Web Conference, April 17th to 22nd, 2004, New York. Available online: www.blogpulse.com/papers/www2004gumbrecht.pdf.