Blog Reading and Blog Readers: Tools and Practices

Most previous work on blogging focuses on bloggers. This includes ethnographic studies of bloggers, social network analyses of linking patterns in blogs, conversational analyses of cross-blog posting and commenting, and other research. In their early work on blogging, Nardi et al. (2004) “speculate that blogging is just as much about reading as writing” and posit that “future research is sure to pay attention to blog readers.” This is that research.

This talk begins be describing the Smarter Blogroll, a tool intended to make blogrolls more manageable for blog readers. It then presents the results of a qualitative study of blog readers. The goal of this study was to explore readers’ habits and practices, readers’ perceptions of bloggers, and the role of the reader in the activity of blogging. Results speak to the habitual nature of blog reading, questions of online identity perception, the ways in which readers feel that they are a part of the blogs they read, and the various ways in which readers define what constitutes a blog. The talk will also include preliminary findings from a study focusing on readers of political blogs to understand how blog reading fits into larger social structures that span online and offline settings, as well as to examine more closely the interactions between readers and bloggers.

In part, the goal of this work is to explore the ways in which social media like blogs affect and impact the way that we perceive and constitute social interaction, both through the medium of blogs and elsewhere. This research is also being conducted with an eye to developing tools for blog readers. Our previous and current studies indicate many interesting ways in which both the activity of blog reading and blogger-reader interactions could be better supported than they are with current computational technologies. This talk describes some such tools that are currently in early stages of development.