Bridging the gap: a genre analysis of Weblogs

Weblogs (blogs) - frequently modified Web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence - are the latest genre of Internet communication to attain widespread popularity, yet their characteristics have not been systematically described. 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. Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented towards external events, and underestimate the importance of blogs as…