AoIR Abstract

Author(s): Karen Gustafson

Title: " Blog Sites and the Creation of Community"

*** Weblogs, or blogs, appeared on the Internet in the late 1990s and remain a significant online cultural phenomenon in the US and internationally. Despite the press coverage of blogs in online and traditional media sources, little has been written in scholarly research about these web sites as a form of community building. The research proposed here will examine several top-ranked political blogs, evaluating them according to standards of online community derived from the work of Jeffrey Abramson, Derek Foster, and Howard Rheingold. Ultimately, this paper intends to argue that blogging constitutes a significant, albeit strongly hierarchical, site of online community formation.
This research is significant because blogging offers a new space of online community and political debate. The Internet has long been considered a significant site of community building, linking distant people together via web sites and email lists. During a period of overwhelming consolidation in US and global media, the Internet is especially important as a public space, and blogs, online journal sites, may offer a new means of public interaction. Although there are no definite counts of blogs and blog participants, Blogger.com, one of the top online tools, has approximately 1.5 million members (Drier, 2003) and in September 2003, MacLean's reported estimates of up to two million blogs in existence (Snider, 2003).While the World Wide Web has become increasingly commercial and influenced by the mass media, blogs are potential sites for independent thought, media criticism, and community-building.
Community has been an important trope for years in online communication studies, and scholars such as Abramson, Rheingold, and Foster have contributed to a growing body of work addressing the potentials of Internet-based community. Jurgen Habermas' notion of the public sphere has been influential in many of these analyses, especially in the context of Internet commercialization. Rheingold draws upon Habermas in his analyses of virtual communities (1993). Referring to the Habermasian ideal speech space, Rheingold calls for a politically-conscious virtual citizenry that will resist the strategies of capitalist mass culture and authoritarian government. Abramson (1997) and Foster (1998) provide valuable theorizations of online community that will be utilized in this study. Foster argues that cohesive mutual interests are needed to constitute true community, and Abramson suggests that strong community is reliant upon manageable participant numbers, shared deliberation, and equality. Although these blogs are not expected to fully meet the criteria for community described by these scholars, this research suggests that blog sites do represent a significant, albeit imperfect, form of online community. Blogs are web sites with brief, frequently updated posts, and can be authored by a single person or by many contributors who post to the site. Thousands of blogs have emerged since 1997, when the term weblog was first coined, and together they compose a media ecosystem, often linking to one another (Stone, 2002). The entire system is often called the blogosphere. The blogosphere is measured both according to incoming links, or other sites linking to particular blogs, and also by audience numbers, measured by hits to the blog site. This research examines six highly ranked blogs, each chosen for its number of viewer hits (the number of times a unique IP address connects with the web site) and number of citations from other blogs. These blogs are Instapundit.com, Daily Kos, Eschaton, Andrew Sullivan.com, The Drudge Report, and the USS Cluelesssites, each of which is cited in the top fifteen of two different weblog ranking websites, www.truthlaidbear.com and www.daypop.com. These sites are all focused on US politics and range from conservative to leftist.
This project addresses the structure and content of these blogs and evaluates them according to their levels of interactivity and community engagement within and beyond the blogosphere. First, the research looks at the content, format, and structure of the sites, including the self-descriptions of the authors, and the posted site policies. Because most blogs publish a large volume of posts per day, only two weeks of actual content will be sampled on each blog, ranging from March 17 to March 31, 2003. This date range was chosen because it encompasses the March 20 US invasion of Iraq, an event of worldwide controversy and protest. The content of the blogs will be analyzed for shared discursive themes, use of mass media news, and explicit mentions of other blogs. These sites will be evaluated for user interactivity as well-while some blogs are completely in control of their primary author, others allow moderated or unmoderated posts from outside contributors. The structure and content of each blog will be analyzed for permanent and temporary links to other blogs, references to the blogging community, and user interactivity. The research will examine how these six popular blogs are situated within the larger Internet community, asking how community is defined on these sites. The content analysis described here is modeled on David Altheide's method of qualitative media analysis (1996). Altheide's method is especially appropriate to this study, allowing flexibility in coding while using constant comparative method to ensure reliability in analysis. The blog sites' structure will be critically studied as well, drawing upon Lawrence Lessig's concept of code, or the architecture of web sites (1999). For Lessig, coding will decide to what degree users have privacy, access, and the ability to engage in free speech with other users.
This research is significant in several respects: It brings attention to an understudied online medium, the web log, and highlights the community-building potential of this Internet phenomenon. Blogs provide a rich site of investigation for online culture, and the sites examined here are particularly noteworthy due to their popularity and diverse political stances. It is useful to study these blogs as elements of a growing group of online communities, and this research will argue that although they do not fully meet theoretical standards of community, these sites do exhibit a sense of membership, common interests, and shared purpose.

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AoIR 5.0

	*Author(s):* Karen Gustafson
	*Title:* " Blog Sites and the Creation of Community"

***	Weblogs, or blogs, appeared on the Internet in the late 1990s and remain a significant online cultural phenomenon in the US and internationally. Despite the press coverage of blogs in online and traditional media sources, little has been written in scholarly research about these web sites as a form of community building. The research proposed here will examine several top-ranked political blogs, evaluating them according to standards of online community derived from the work of Jeffrey Abramson, Derek Foster, and Howard Rheingold. Ultimately, this paper intends to argue that blogging constitutes a significant, albeit strongly hierarchical, site of online community formation. This research is significant because blogging offers a new space of online community and political debate. The Internet has long been considered a significant site of community building, linking distant people together via web sites and email lists. During a period of overwhelming consolidation in US and global media, the Internet is especially important as a public space, and blogs, online journal sites, may offer a new means of public interaction. Although there are no definite counts of blogs and blog participants, Blogger.com, one of the top online tools, has approximately 1.5 million members (Drier, 2003) and in September 2003, MacLean's reported estimates of up to two million blogs in existence (Snider, 2003).While the World Wide Web has become increasingly commercial and influenced by the mass media, blogs are potential sites for independent thought, media criticism, and community-building. Community has been an important trope for years in online communication studies, and scholars such as Abramson, Rheingold, and Foster have contributed to a growing body of work addressing the potentials of Internet-based community. Jurgen Habermas' notion of the public sphere has been influential in many of these analyses, especially in the context of Internet commercialization. Rheingold draws upon Habermas in his analyses of virtual communities (1993). Referring to the Habermasian ideal speech space, Rheingold calls for a politically-conscious virtual citizenry that will resist the strategies of capitalist mass culture and authoritarian government. Abramson (1997) and Foster (1998) provide valuable theorizations of online community that will be utilized in this study. Foster argues that cohesive mutual interests are needed to constitute true community, and Abramson suggests that strong community is reliant upon manageable participant numbers, shared deliberation, and equality. Although these blogs are not expected to fully meet the criteria for community described by these scholars, this research suggests that blog sites do represent a significant, albeit imperfect, form of online community. Blogs are web sites with brief, frequently updated posts, and can be authored by a single person or by many contributors who post to the site. Thousands of blogs have emerged since 1997, when the term weblog was first coined, and together they compose a media ecosystem, often linking to one another (Stone, 2002). The entire system is often called the blogosphere. The blogosphere is measured both according to incoming links, or other sites linking to particular blogs, and also by audience numbers, measured by hits to the blog site. This research examines six highly ranked blogs, each chosen for its number of viewer hits (the number of times a unique IP address connects with the web site) and number of citations from other blogs. These blogs are Instapundit.com, Daily Kos, Eschaton, Andrew Sullivan.com, The Drudge Report, and the USS Cluelesssites, each of which is cited in the top fifteen of two different weblog ranking websites, www.truthlaidbear.com and www.daypop.com. These sites are all focused on US politics and range from conservative to leftist. This project addresses the structure and content of these blogs and evaluates them according to their levels of interactivity and community engagement within and beyond the blogosphere. First, the research looks at the content, format, and structure of the sites, including the self-descriptions of the authors, and the posted site policies. Because most blogs publish a large volume of posts per day, only two weeks of actual content will be sampled on each blog, ranging from March 17 to March 31, 2003. This date range was chosen because it encompasses the March 20 US invasion of Iraq, an event of worldwide controversy and protest. The content of the blogs will be analyzed for shared discursive themes, use of mass media news, and explicit mentions of other blogs. These sites will be evaluated for user interactivity as well-while some blogs are completely in control of their primary author, others allow moderated or unmoderated posts from outside contributors. The structure and content of each blog will be analyzed for permanent and temporary links to other blogs, references to the blogging community, and user interactivity. The research will examine how these six popular blogs are situated within the larger Internet community, asking how community is defined on these sites. The content analysis described here is modeled on David Altheide's method of qualitative media analysis (1996). Altheide's method is especially appropriate to this study, allowing flexibility in coding while using constant comparative method to ensure reliability in analysis. The blog sites' structure will be critically studied as well, drawing upon Lawrence Lessig's concept of code, or the architecture of web sites (1999). For Lessig, coding will decide to what degree users have privacy, access, and the ability to engage in free speech with other users. This research is significant in several respects: It brings attention to an understudied online medium, the web log, and highlights the community-building potential of this Internet phenomenon. Blogs provide a rich site of investigation for online culture, and the sites examined here are particularly noteworthy due to their popularity and diverse political stances. It is useful to study these blogs as elements of a growing group of online communities, and this research will argue that although they do not fully meet theoretical standards of community, these sites do exhibit a sense of membership, common interests, and shared purpose.