A collaborative weblog project by graduate students Lois Ann Scheidt, Sabrina Bonus, and Elijah Wright, along with professor Susan C. Herring, was voted the "Best Blogged paper" by the Incsub Association's 2004 Edublog Awards. The paper, which was presented at the 37th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences in January 2004, provides a systematic description of the properties of the weblog as an Internet communication genre.
"This paper presents the results of a content analysis of 203 randomly-selected weblogs, comparing the empirically observable features of the corpus with popular claims about the nature of weblogs, and finding them to differ in a number of respects," according to the abstract.
"Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented toward external events, and underestimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self-expression. Based on the profile generated by the empirical analysis, we consider the likely antecedents of the blog genre, situate it with respect to the dominant forms of digital communication on the Internet today, and advance predictions about its long-term impacts."
The authors are members of the SLIS Blog Research on Genre [BROG] project. The award-wining paper is available at http://www.blogninja.com/DDGDD04.doc
Posted December 20, 2004