This sounds like a book I’ll enjoy reading: The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs, by Viviane Serfaty, who teaches American studies at the University of Strasbourg. Hunting around I find that in 2002 she gave a talk at that conference in Paris I wished I’d been at. From the trip report at Hypertext Kitchen:

“Online diaries: Towards a Structural Approach” was an extremely interesting paper by Viviane Serfaty, in which she proposed a description of the structural characteristics of online diaries or Web logs, based in the four parameters of accumulation, open-endness, self-reflexivity and co-production.

She’s also done work on women’s creation of identity in anonymous diaries and on the Aesthetics of Al Gore’s and George Bush’s Campaign 2000 Websites. She has published a book on internet politics, which grew out of her doctoral thesis, and yet her earlier grad work was in literature. She sure sounds like someone whose work I will enjoy.