Literature review
Today's thoughts are all linked to some of the literature I have been reading (or re-reading) over the last few days.
As I said before, I have been working on the subject of motivations for blogging for the past two years now, on and off, but this is the first time I have had the time and space to concentrate on the subject. So I am starting off by reading all the literature that I have found and also everything that C., my hard-working research assistant last year, found.
Mortensen and Walker suggest that academic researchers can use blogs to store and sort through their research ideas and this was one of the main motivations for my starting this particular blog. I can see that blogging about what I am reading may help me remember it - and also my thoughts on various matters better than writing notes.
One of the things I think I want to research a little more in my survey is why bloggers choose their particular blog name. Mortensen and Walker mention the metaphors used in naming academic's blogs - 'all point to a structure not submitting to an academically accepted logic, but to a personal logic'. I am not sure that anyone has done anything else on choice of name so that might be an interesting way to go.
Other things that I might want to look more at include the use of images of self in the blogs - I am strangely troubled by my decision to put my photograph up on my blog despite the fact that it is going to be supremely easy to find out who I am, particularly if I continue to do as first envisaged and put a link to this blog into the survey.
Also more work on the blogroll. This was, I think, the most interesting finding of the paper I gave in Bulgaria in June on the practices of British Bloggers, and I want to look more into, not just gender, but geographic location of blogrollers (if I can call them that). What was this finding? When I broken down the blogroll of a sample of male and female bloggers, almost to a man male bloggers linked to male bloggers while female bloggers linked 50-50 to men and women. I know that this has been discussed almost to death in relation to US bloggers and the A list, etc, but it is interesting to see it happen in the UK as well. However, I also want to look into the whole issue of geographic location as well. As far as I can see from my pilot survey, UK bloggers link to other UK bloggers, many of whom they actually know in real life.
I've also been rereading Nardi et al. I can see that their very small selection of bloggers used a far more diverse range of blogging software than the survey of British bloggers we conducted last year. Is this because they were American? Because they were earlier into blogging? Again, my comparison of US and UK bloggers should help to answer this and to see if things have changed now. Nardi et al talk about motivations for blogging, but although they mention catharsis they don't talk about validation, which I think is a key motivator for the women bloggers I surveyed.
So now I need some people to read and comment on these thoughts!!
As I said before, I have been working on the subject of motivations for blogging for the past two years now, on and off, but this is the first time I have had the time and space to concentrate on the subject. So I am starting off by reading all the literature that I have found and also everything that C., my hard-working research assistant last year, found.
Mortensen and Walker suggest that academic researchers can use blogs to store and sort through their research ideas and this was one of the main motivations for my starting this particular blog. I can see that blogging about what I am reading may help me remember it - and also my thoughts on various matters better than writing notes.
One of the things I think I want to research a little more in my survey is why bloggers choose their particular blog name. Mortensen and Walker mention the metaphors used in naming academic's blogs - 'all point to a structure not submitting to an academically accepted logic, but to a personal logic'. I am not sure that anyone has done anything else on choice of name so that might be an interesting way to go.
Other things that I might want to look more at include the use of images of self in the blogs - I am strangely troubled by my decision to put my photograph up on my blog despite the fact that it is going to be supremely easy to find out who I am, particularly if I continue to do as first envisaged and put a link to this blog into the survey.
Also more work on the blogroll. This was, I think, the most interesting finding of the paper I gave in Bulgaria in June on the practices of British Bloggers, and I want to look more into, not just gender, but geographic location of blogrollers (if I can call them that). What was this finding? When I broken down the blogroll of a sample of male and female bloggers, almost to a man male bloggers linked to male bloggers while female bloggers linked 50-50 to men and women. I know that this has been discussed almost to death in relation to US bloggers and the A list, etc, but it is interesting to see it happen in the UK as well. However, I also want to look into the whole issue of geographic location as well. As far as I can see from my pilot survey, UK bloggers link to other UK bloggers, many of whom they actually know in real life.
I've also been rereading Nardi et al. I can see that their very small selection of bloggers used a far more diverse range of blogging software than the survey of British bloggers we conducted last year. Is this because they were American? Because they were earlier into blogging? Again, my comparison of US and UK bloggers should help to answer this and to see if things have changed now. Nardi et al talk about motivations for blogging, but although they mention catharsis they don't talk about validation, which I think is a key motivator for the women bloggers I surveyed.
So now I need some people to read and comment on these thoughts!!
posted by Sarah at 10:51 AM
2 Comments:
Hah! Validation! That's just the word I used in my survey response.
Interesting about the women linking 50:50 to male/female while men just link to men. I think that sounds about right except for a few male bloggers on my roll who I think are more democratic.
The other male bloggers are so up their backsides and A lists they are utterly dull and stupid.
You asked about blog names. I used to have a tag line that explained my blog name which was as a result of a bit of repartee with a UK blogger who I knew but hadn't met and before I came over to the Blog World. As part of the joke between us it was my wanna-be porn name not that I was a grandma or want to be a porn star.
Anyway, as a result of that tagline which explained it, I received a lot of traffic from search engines from people searching for gran porn. Indeed, this comment page should now get traffic as a result of it! So my stat counter whizzes merrily around making a farce of all those numbers but I digress.
I'd be very interested to know how YOU get on or feel about blogging publicly. At what point will you feel you need to hold back because others may read what you don't want them to but you know you would want to write what you are thinking? Only a handful of close confidantes know who I am and read my blog and as dear as some of them are I find that just sometimes I may want to say something about them or a connected situation but it is just not appropriate.
I'm a bit of a Jekkyl and Hyde with great chunks of my life not being shared so in future years my blog, which appears for all intents as a personal diary, would not be entirely representative of my activities.
I don't have any problems about images of myself - I just don't so I use the Betty Boop image and re-do the artwork to fit what I want.
On the other hand, I can't bear all these cutesy images on blogs as if that is the blogger. At least Betty Boop has a ridiculously cartoonish look though I don't mind her curves :-) Double standards I know.
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