Assignment 5: Squeezing Weblogs Into Little Square Boxes

Blog assignment 5: Examine three blogs of your choice. Aim for diverse blogs (group vs individual, personal vs journalistic, different types of people, etc).

Interview bloggers as part of your analysis.

Consider the content using genre analysis.

What motivates the users to post?

How do they categorize their entries?

How do people decide who to link to?

Use information theory (as reported in the game readings) to analyze your blog sample.

I studied a close friend’s almost completely text-based personal weblog (The Official Record: www.creamy.com/blog), a frequently-updated personal site that consists mostly of photos (Satan’s Laundromat: www.satanslaundromat.com), and a weblog that resembles an opinionated business column (Reiter's Camera Phone Report: www.cameraphonereport.com). I interviewed the owners of the first two sites; the third weblogger didn’t answer my interview request.

Genres

R. Blood classifies weblogs into three basic types: filters (which focus on content external to the weblogger), personal journals, and notebooks (which can focus on external or internal content but are distinguished by longer, focused essays.)

S. Krishnamurthy proposes a weblog classification system consisting of a graph with two axes, as seen here:

The Official Record lies far towards the individual side of Krishnamurthy’s spectrum and it tends strongly towards quadrant I (“online diaries”) although it often veers towards the more topical territory of quadrant III (“enhanced column”). Blood would consider The Official Record a personal journal.

In one sense Satan’s Laundromat fits squarely into the “online diaries” quadrant and is clearly a personal journal. But keep in mind that this is primarily a photolog, and I’m not sure these classifications are quite as appropriate here as they are in describing mostly-textual weblogs. Many photos (and particularly those on Satan’s Laundromat) are of personal interest but simultaneously of universal interest. I don’t care to read what a stranger ate for breakfast, which I can find on many journal weblogs, but a photo of the funky greasy-spoon diner where that breakfast was eaten will probably interest me. I think many people feel the same way).

Satan’s Laundromat author Mike E. doesn’t even consider his site to be a weblog, although it fits the definitions provided in our weblog readings. Mike wrote:

I certainly don't consider myself a blogger. I recognize that the site has bloggish aspects, but I don't think of it as a blog. Of course, honestly, protests that your site isn't a blog tend not to be believed once you're nominated for a Bloggie… I'd definitely describe SL as a photolog, which is more or less synonymous with photoblog. Basically, when I think "blog," I think "I had X for breakfast, I'm not sure I like the new Lipton label design, sometimes my girlfriend gets on my nerves, and I saw last night and wow! And I hate hipsters!" Or I think "list of links with brief commentary." Of course, there are varying levels of quality, and some are quite good, but for me a "blog," without further qualification, is text-based. There are genres, of course, like political blogs, but for me political blogs are blogs in a much more real sense than most photo[b]logs are. (For one thing, they are much more likely tocomment on a post on another site and intelligently discuss the ideas in it, which is quite rare in photo[b]logs.)

Reiter's Camera Phone Report falls squarely into quadrant III of Krishnamurthy’s classification system, the quadrant labeled “enhanced column”. It’s very much a filter but it’s also something of a personal journal. Reiter specializes in the world of camphones, he makes a point of keeping up to date with news and theory and discussion about these devices and through this site he summarizes and links to such material, but he also shares his own opinions liberally throughout the coverage.

Motivation

David D., author of The Official Record, keeps his weblog primarily for his own records. “More than anything,” he writes, “I want a record of my thoughts and experiences so that I don't forget them. Of course, I also want to share useful information with others.”

Mike E. of Satan’s Laundromat started his site as simply a way to share his photos of funny or interesting things. Mike wrote: “I just wanted to put some photos up, didn't feel like doing a bunch of coding, and hit upon Movable Type as a CMS [content management system] to use, mostly because [a] friend was using it and I figured I could ask her for help if I needed to.”

I can only guess at the motivation behind Alan Reiter’s Camera Phone Report because I haven’t spoken to Reiter. But based on the content of Alan Reiter’s site, it seems clear that an interest in camera phone news along with a desire to network, grow his personal brand and become well known in the camera phone industry all motivate the construction and maintenance of his site. Come to think of it, many webloggers use their weblogs to grow their personal or company brands. No; come to think of it, most of them do; some are more modest about it, some come across in their weblogs as regular publicity hounds. Neither of the weblog analysis frameworks that we covered in the class readings address this important and widespread motivation behind weblogging. [NOTE: After writing this I came across my classmate Jon's entry that's all about weblogs as branding and marketing tools; check it out if you're interested in the subject.]

Categorization

David D. does not use official sortable categories in his weblog, but he does write what he calls recurring “columns” such as “Book Review” and “NYC Restaurant Review,” and “Last Weekend” in which he describes what he did the previous weekend. Many entries have no categories.

Satan’s Laundromat provides no categories that are visible to readers, but author Mike E. does attach his own internal, geographic categories to his photos. Technical difficulties involving content-management templates prevent him from sharing these categories – his current categories would spur gigantic pages for his biggest categories, wasting bandwidth and slowing down the site’s performance. He plans to implement category-archive templates that will solve this problem but until then he’s not publicizing the categories.

The entries in Reiter’s Camera Phone Report are divided into 30 categories such as “Applications - Camera phones,” “Reviews – Camera phones” and “Future - Camera phones.” It’s not clear why every category ends with “Camera phones” when camphones are the subject of the entire site.

Links to Others

David D. is sensitive to privacy issues, he’s savvy about weblogs and search engines, and he never uses friends’ last names. When recounting activities with friends he avoids linking to those friends’ weblogs and he refers to friends using the first name, last initial format (for example: David D.), because he thinks that “it's not my place to tell my friends' readers what my friends are doing in their free time.” David D. provides permanent links to eight weblogs belonging to friends, along with an offer to link to any other friends’ weblogs that he has forgotten.

Mike E. links to friends’ sites and to sites that typically either are photologs that he likes, or are weblogs that involve New York, or are New York photologs.

From the front page of his camera phone weblog, Alan Reiter permanently links to:

Columns and articles which laud him

four advertisers’ sites (served up via Ads by Google)

his own other two Web sites

camphone handset vendors’ sites

carrier and handset software providers’ sites

moblog hosting companies [a moblog is a photo weblog that can be updated from the field via a camphone]

”camera phone resources” – six other sites specializing in camera phone information and services

individual/group moblogs

camera phone review sites

Reiter’s own moblog sites and photo albums

To be honest, this analysis really lacks useful substance. The Blood/Krishnamurthy/Nardi/Herring weblog-analysis frameworks might be a start, but I think they're not very useful in analyzing blogs. In fact, I think adherence to these frameworks' artificial constraints is counterproductive. Perhaps our collective conceptions of weblogs are changing too quickly to realistically capture them in such frameworks? Maybe it's just me; I have trouble just separating my laundry into lights and darks.

Posted by sean at Květen 03, 2004 12:37 AM | TrackBack (0)