There’s a round table email discussion (well, actually the round table bit means each participant answered the same questions, there wasn’t any discussion) story on scholars who study blogs at the Annenberg Online Journalism Review. I’m in it, which is groovy, with Kaye Trammell, Alex Halavais and Cori Dauber.
Kaye has just completed her PhD on celebrity blogs and has been leaking some interesting findings recently. She’s done what sounds like a pretty thorough content analysis of a lot of blog posts and the comments to them. In the round table, she notes that the blog posts she analysed discussed issue rather than persons, and in other posts she’s found gender differences in commenting styles and the kinds of posts fans respond to on celebrity blogs.
Matt
Hmm, going round the table only once seems to be a poor way of establishing anything other than a fragmented picture. Isn’t this where the Delphi technique starts off? Then again, perhaps consensus wasn’t wanted…
Jill
Well, you know, going round once is much more efficient. It does show a diversity of opinion, though of course discussion’s good too.
Anyway, we all blog, so I guess we could all be discussing away now. Only I don’t have time…
Matt
One of my opinions is that the “point” of blog-culture, Cambrian explosion that it is, is to highlight individual opinion as an end in itself. Rather than do anything useful such as, let us say, writing a research paper (recalling Tim Berners-Lee’ aims of WWW). Whether my other opinions agree remains open, as they compete for my resources.