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CHIMERA WORKING PAPER NUMBER: CWP-2005-02

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Blogging: personal participation in public knowledge-
building on the web

Chimera Working Paper Number: 2005, 02

Mark Brady

mbrady@essex.ac.uk

Blogs have emerged from a humble beginning to become a highly networked mass of online
knowledge and communication. All kinds of research, from searching for the best price of the latest
mobile phone, to more rigorous forms, are conducted through the blog medium. The mechanisms
that provide the possibility for blogs to link to each other provide possibilities for collaboration and
knowledge sharing in a fast, public and convenient manner. This working paper discusses the
lessons that can be learned from collaboration and research in the blogosphere with a view to how
they can be applied to academic and commercial research.

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Chimera

The work reported in this paper is part of the scientific programme of Chimera, the Institute for Socio-
technical Innovation and Research at the University of Essex.

Chimera is a post-disciplinary institute employing social scientists, computer scientists, engineers,
anthropologists, psychologists, HCI practitioners and interface designers specialising in ‘socio-technical’
research and consulting. It was set up in April 2002 at Adastral Park, Suffolk as a research institute of the
University of Essex.

Chimera carries out research which combines the social and technological sciences to:

•

generate insights into personal and social use of information and communication technologies,

•

ground technological innovation in an understanding of people,

•

provide analysis to support evidence-based 'information society' strategies and policies in the public and

commercial domain.

We achieve this through a balanced programme of basic and applied research projects, consultancy and
publication. For more information see

www.essex.ac.uk/chimera

Contacting Chimera

Chimera
Institute of Socio-Technical Innovation and Research
Ross Building (PP1, ROS-IP)
Adastral Park,
Martlesham Heath,
Ipswich, Suffolk,
IP5 3RE
UK

Tel: +44 (01473) 632238
Fax: +44 (01473) 614936
E-mail: chimera@essex.ac.uk
Web:

http://www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/

Citing This Paper

Readers wishing to cite this paper are asked to use the following form of words:

Brady, M. (2005) ‘Blogging, personal participation in public knowledge-building on the web’, Chimera
Working Paper 2005-02>. Colchester: University of Essex.

For an on-line version of this working paper and others in the series go to

www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/publications.html

transmitted, in any form, or by any means, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without

the prior permission of the Director, Chimera

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Table of Contents

Introduction to weblogs .................................................................................................................. 4

Snapshot of blog format ................................................................................................................. 5

Brief history of the blog .................................................................................................................. 6

Blogging as public space for distributed knowledge-building .................................................... 7

Controlling and motivating knowledge synthesis: a collaborative process ............................. 10

Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 13

Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... 14

Bibliography................................................................................................................................... 15

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1 Introduction

weblogs

From a humble beginning as ‘What’s New’ pages, blogs have arisen to become arguably the most
popular online personal publishing platform on the internet. Over the last few years blogs have come to
the fore appearing not only in the news media but also in search engine results pages.

Blogs (also known as web logs, or weblogs) are web sites that contain frequently updated ‘posts’ with the
most recent entry at the top of the page and the previous ones displayed reverse-chronologically. The
type of information contained within a blog varies greatly from individual to individual. Authors of blogs
(known as bloggers) can describe day-to-day observations in their lives, or more specific topics of
interest to them, such as web design or cycling. Some frequently visited blogs are topic related (e.g.
http://www.instapundit.com, one of the most visited blogs). Some mix this in with personal events in the
author’s life (e.g. www.kottke.org, another popular blog), such as going on holiday or meeting new
people.

Since blogs are web sites, they are controlled and navigated using hyperlinks, and posts typically
incorporate hyperlinks to other blogs or news sources, together with related comments and discussions.
When blogs start linking to each other and commenting on what has been said, huge, distributed
discussions can erupt that include many different bloggers, and concern many different topics.

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2 Snapshot of blog format

Blogs appear in many shapes and sizes. The design is at the author’s discretion, much like a typical
webpage. Nevertheless, the majority of blogs converge on a simple layout of a title banner at the top of
the page, a ‘side bar’ at the left or right of the page with the ‘posting area’ featuring the main content
taking up the remainder of the page (Fig.1).

Figure 1: Typical layout of a blog

Possibly the most varied and idiosyncratic area of the three, the side bar, is an eclectic mix of links and
information related to the blog and its author. Typical features of the side bar include a ‘blogroll’ or list of
links to other blogs, an archive of past posts in date order (which can go back a number of years) and
information about the author, not dissimilar to an ‘About’ page on a personal web site. However, the side
bar often displays many other types of information besides the few examples given here, a symptom of
the diversity present in the blog community (collectively known as the ‘blogosphere’).

Blogs are created using the same language as web pages and therefore they inherit the properties of a
web page. As a result of this, blogs are cross-modal in that they can display not only text, but also
images (most commonly in the form of digital photographs), audio and video.

It is also possible for a blog to have more than one author, sometimes known as collaborative blogs. A
single blog, therefore, can incorporate the writings of many people, usually with each post having a
signature at the end designating the author. These types of blog are popular among families and
organisations, although they also have many other uses. The ease with which blogs can be set up
means that they are ideal for ephemeral events such as conferences allowing many different people to
publish information rather than a single individual being responsible for all the information.

To illustrate the format further, Figure 2 shows a screenshot from a blog called Chocolate N’ Vodka. Note
the ordering of the posts according to time, also links within the posts to other web sites and blogs.

Figure 2: Screenshot from the Chocolate N’ Vodka blog showing 3 posts (from
chocnvodka.blogware.com, a blog by Suw Charman which has been running since 2003, reproduced by
kind permission of Suw Charman). [1] shows date that the post was written. [2] title of post, author’s
name and exact date and time when post was created. [3] comments and permalink (described here in
full as ‘Permanent Link’, see below). [4] reference and link to a post on another blog. Words underlined
are hyperlinks..

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3 Brief history of the blog

It is difficult to judge the exact moment when blogs came into existence since there is some debate
about when a personal homepage becomes a blog. Blogging does not seem to have been invented by
any one person or organisation (certainly not part of university research or designed initially as a
research tool); rather it has emerged due to a series of events brought about by many people. In 1993
Mosaic, the nascent web browser company, published a page on its web site called ‘What’s New’ (Blood
2003). This listed and linked to new sites on the web that users of the browser could visit. With the world
wide web blossoming, more people soon took the cue to produce links to new and interesting sites found
while surfing the web, and publish them on their own personal homepages. As this style of web page
became more popular, it became apparent that a name was needed to differentiate them from other web
pages. Jorn Barger, a writer, was the first person to use the term ‘web log’ in 1997. During the early
summer of 1999, Peter Merholz, a user interface consultant and web designer, used the term ‘wee blog’
on his weblog, which soon became truncated to just ‘blog’.

These first sites were edited by hand in HTML (hypertext mark-up language) and then uploaded to a web
server manually. They were thus perhaps technically closer to our concept of a personal homepage,
although the typical ‘link and comment’ pattern seen in blogs today was present. As there are virtually no
distinguishing features of a blog to determine it from a normal webpage, other than layout, it is almost
impossible to know the number of blogs in these early stages. Even now it is difficult to know the number
of active blogs in existence. However, one can assume that between 1993 and 1999 the numbers were
very small, most being authored by those with an interest in various aspects of information technology.

It was not until 1999 that a number of companies emerged to produce software that allowed blogs to be
created and updated very easily. This allowed people with previously little or no knowledge about HTML
and the internet to begin producing their own blogs. The move towards making the medium more
accessible spurred a growth in the number of bloggers, and therefore the diversity of blogs.

The features of blogging that make it stand out as a unique medium also allow it to be seen as a step in
the mass ‘amateurisation’ of publishing (Coates 2003a). Before the age of the internet it was theoretically
possible for everyone to publish material that was accessible to anyone who could read and afford a
newspaper. However, the decision to publish was at the discretion of an editor and it largely depended
on literacy skills, social class and luck whether your contribution was selected from the thousands of
others sent to the newspaper or magazine.

With the advent of the internet, publishing ‘one-to-many’ became infinitely easier. Anyone with a
computer and internet connection could publish their own material allowing anyone else with the
necessary equipment to read it. In the early days of the internet, this was limited to those with the money
to spend on the equipment and the knowledge to set it up. As electronics prices dropped, the number of
people able to publish increased, yet there was still no easy way to quickly create webpages and
frequently update them without dealing with files and downloading programs onto the computer.

Finally, blogs appeared. A company called Pitas launched a new web service which provided the ability
to simply visit a web site, sign up and publish a blog within minutes. Updating a blog became as easy as
clicking a button. The increasing pervasiveness of the internet in the home, workplace and in public
areas provided practically anyone with the ability to publish.

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4 Blogging as public space for distributed knowledge-building

Since the first appearance of what we now recognise as the blog, there has been a move towards it
becoming a far more contributive medium. In particular, three additions to the blog have had far-reaching
effects in the way that the blog community operates; permalinks (permanent links), comments and
trackback. Indeed, the fact that the blog community or ‘blogosphere’ is a community is owed largely to
these innovations (none are 100 per cent ubiquitous throughout the blogosphere, however, suggesting it
is still evolving). Permalinks point to individual blog posts, comments enable readers to feedback about
an individual post, and trackback is a citation notification system – simple changes in terms of program
development but with far broader social, collaborative effects.

Permalinks, usually found at the end of a blog posting, provide a permanent link to that post. Following
the permalink from another web page will link back to the blog, providing the post with its own page,
together with its associated comments and trackbacks. The ability to point to specific posts, rather than
to a blog as a whole, provides a landscape for conversations whereby specific references can be made
to comments by a blogger. Furthermore, permalinks provide an increased incentive to link between blogs
and posts, building up a huge networked conversation.

Permalinks have the added benefit of furnishing a blog with a memory (Coates 2003b). Clearly there is a
limit to the amount of information that can be displayed on the front page before it becomes
unmanageable and too hefty to download. Instead of posts ‘dropping off’ the bottom of the page and
ceasing to exist, permalinks allow posts to be archived and referenced even when they are not displayed
on the front page, providing the content with longevity. By allowing other bloggers to point to individual
posts, the permalink effectively breaks down the blog home page into a finer grain of many posts. This
allows the post to be treated as a unit in its own right – a kind of archive - and therefore allows the
implementation of comments and trackback.

Typically located at the end of a post, comments allow other users to directly leave feedback about the
attached post. The comments are viewable by everyone reading the blog thus opening a direct route of
contact with the author as well as the blog’s audience and helping to increase the immediacy of the
conversational element of blogs. Since they are readable by anyone reading the blog and anyone can
leave feedback, they are also a way of allowing readers (who do not need to author their own blog) to
communicate with each other with the blog post as the topic of discussion, potentially creating ties
between readers. Comments also help to increase a feeling of others’ presence so it can be seen which
blogs are more popular as well as which posts generate more discussion.

Trackback is a more recent addition, again usually found at the bottom of a blog post. Trackback is like a
citation alert mechanism, allowing blogger A to inform blogger B that blogger B is being referenced by
blogger A. For example, Dan reads a post on Lara’s blog and decides to write his own post about it on
his blog. So he publishes his thoughts and since they both use the trackback system, Lara is informed
that Dan has just written about her. Unlike linking with a permalink, whereby the person being linked to is
unaware, trackback is a visible two-way bridge between two blogs. This permanent bridge-building
encourages links between blogs and increases the social networking that helps to enlarge and maintain
communities.

The above three components of blogs together contribute greatly to the mechanism with which the
blogosphere is maintained and becomes a networked mass of linked people and information. So far I
have described the way that these components promote communication and feedback between
individual blogs. Now let us stand back a level and look at the overall effect that this has upon the
information that passes along the links and nodes of the networked blogosphere.

Because blogs are public and allow for dynamic interaction, active collaboration and sharing are made
possible. This allows ideas and knowledge to become transparent and easily transferable across
disciplines, and to many diverse sets of people. Certain ideas are not picked up or noticed, while others
become popular and spread rapidly throughout the blogosphere. Linking from one blog to another using
a permalink or trackback supports the easy and often rapid creation of associations between ideas.

Further, again because blogs are public, web services as well as individuals can tap into their power to
develop interesting uses. One such service is ‘All Consuming’ (allconsuming.net). This searches recently
updated blogs every hour for links to books on well known web sites such as Amazon. All Consuming
makes an assumption that when a blogger links to a book on one of these sites, it will be accompanied
by some meaningful text about that book. These blog entries are then associated with the book on the
service’s web site. The site thus becomes a place where people can research purchasing a book by

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reading people’s blog entries to see what they say about it - an online community-built book reviewing
system that works by pooling particular types of information from blogs.

A sudden rise in the number of blogs as well as interest in them occurred shortly after September 11th
2001 when the World Trade Centre in New York became a victim of terrorism. Blogs furnished ordinary
people with the ability to publicly display their shock and disgust at the tragedy. The ability to cross-link
between blogs paved the way for discussion, as a method of trying to understand and deal with what had
happened. Blog communities provided an emotional support mechanism.

Although at first the social side of blogging was not apparent, the introduction of permalinks, comments
and trackback has contributed greatly to its popularity. It could be argued that it is the connective and
contributive attributes of blogging that has caused it to spread so virally throughout the web, and in turn
define blogging as the inherent differentiator from personal homepages (Marlow 2004). A recent study
reports that 27% of American internet users read blogs in 2004, a 58% increase on the previous year
(Pew Internet 2005).

Anderson comments in this volume that research can be seen as something occurring among the public,
outside of university walls. As described above, one of the first uses for blogs was to point readers to
places of interest on the web. That use has not changed to the present day, and blogs are used as filters
whereby collections of information about a single topic can be shown, omitting often irrelevant
information. For example, one blog entry explains some of the scientific background to a science fiction
film, linking to relevant articles and discussions on the web for further reading and clarification. Another
blog with a focus on the Middle East brought together several articles from US, UK, Japanese and New
Zealand news sources. When people use the internet to research particular topics, such repositories are
useful stopping places, providing for the accessible accumulation and synthesis of knowledge that are
important dimensions of research.

Blogging is about sharing. The act of blogging makes information public through publishing online. The
public information is then available for viewing by anyone with internet access. Many bloggers are
experts within a particular field; they research a subject and use their blogs to publish and distribute their
acquired knowledge about the subject area. This information is then free to view, allowing others to learn
and add to their own knowledge. It is common for such bloggers to provide links to articles and papers
supporting their claims, enabling readers to verify the sources.

When many blogs arise around a particular subject area, it is often the case that they will link to one
another and begin discussions. When these discussions form around the task of reaching a particular
goal, formed communities can work towards its achievement through group research and collaboration.
Although blogs were never designed for this purpose (it could be argued that blogs were never
‘designed’ at all), the functionality of a blog lends itself very well to such spontaneous creation of
community (shared documents carrying information, it has been suggested (Brown and Duguid 2002),
can foster community, providing social glue). The citation notification mechanism of trackback makes it
possible to track conversations and trace arguments across many blogs, forming links and therefore
networks of blogs and bloggers. This, in turn, provides a platform for collaboration, and resources for
research and accumulation of knowledge. A recent report claims that 12% of American internet users
have made use of these ‘interactive’ features on blogs (Pew Internet 2004).

A trend is emerging of many new blogs, and in turn blog communities, appearing around global events.
As noted earlier, this first became noticeable around the 9/11 tragedy when many people found blogs a
useful means of sharing their thoughts. The subsequent war in Iraq sparked a new wave of blogs, as did
the 2004 US presidential election. The contentious issue of whether the war was justified or not, as well
as the many arising issues surrounding the war and the election, provided fodder for many inter-blog
discussions around which communities arose. The interesting phenomenon here is that these
communities appeared in a self-organising way, without direction from a central controlling figure.

A famous example of how blogs can quickly form communities and achieve goals is the role of blogs in
the controversy surrounding George W. Bush’s military service. An American TV news network produced
memos suggesting that Bush received preferential treatment in his national service. Only a few hours
after the report was broadcast thousands of bloggers were discussing claims that the documents were
forgeries, despite the White House at first seeming to bow to the original news story. Some of these
bloggers were ex-military personnel from the time of the president’s experience in the armed forces.
They provided information about the format of military documents in 1972, suggesting that the Bush
memos did not conform to this. Others were typographic experts who provided strong evidence
suggesting the documents were produced using a modern word processing program and not a typewriter

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in 1972, as claimed by the news story. Following much public and media interest, bloggers started
discussing, and drawing attention to a Dallas newspaper report about the secretary of the man
responsible for releasing the memos who suggested that they were forged. The result was that the TV
news network admitted they could not prove authenticity, and the news reporter was forced to formally
apologise for reporting on an unsubstantiated story. This shows how blogs can mobilise and respond
incredibly rapidly en masse around a topic to contribute and form new knowledge towards a common
goal collaboratively. In this example experts combined their knowledge to arrive at a goal (providing
evidence suggesting the memos were fakes and discrediting the news story).

Finding blogs relevant to a popular topic of interest is not a difficult task. This is because they tend to
rank highly in search engine results pages. Web sites that have many incoming links and are updated
frequently have a propensity to be favoured by search engines (owing to the algorithms used by search
engines), causing blogs to frequently appear in the top search results. Due to this phenomenon people
interested in the war in Iraq were able to easily find blogs with that theme.

Another aspect that facilitates the creation of communities is the way that blogs can act as collections of
links surrounding a particular theme. One ‘war blogger’ may publish a post about an aspect of the Iraq
war, including several links to other blogs from around the blogosphere in her post. Her post can then be
linked to by many other bloggers interested in her topic. The links that she has included in her post may
then be re-used by many others in their posts. Each wave of this cycle can bring together huge numbers
of blogs into discussions. Salam Pax (otherwise known as the ‘Baghdad Blogger’) was the subject of this
type of propagation of links and information. He was a civilian who was living in Baghdad throughout the
invasion of Iraq and had his blog recognised and linked to by many other blogs interested in the first-
hand accounts he was able to provide. Eventually the links became so prevalent throughout the
blogosphere that journalists discovered the blog and the author became a media celebrity. Another
instance was an influential blogger reporting on an IT consultancy company who fraudulently obtained
his telephone number to sell him their wares. So many bloggers linked to his story that it affected search
engine rankings, so that the blog posting appeared in search results above the company’s own web site
(Slate Magazine 2002; Haughey 2002).

Figure 3: Blog posting bringing together many different articles into a single posting (from
antiwar.com/blog). The words in bold are links to other articles.

Topical blogging, such as war-blogging, illustrates how blogs can be used for knowledge creation and
knowledge sharing. A blog can bring together many points of view from many different blogs and many
different articles from around the web, into a single post by linking to them (for an example see Fig. 3).
Comments and trackbacks allow readers of the post to contribute their own relevant links that help to
support or reason against the argument. That post can then be used and combined with other posts in
other blogs, and in doing so, further the argument.

This pattern is not limited to political discussions or current affairs, however. There are blogs for
discussions in philosophy, for example, and a language blog where linguists collaborate to discuss and
track the frequency of non-standard language usages (Economist 2005: 89). The pattern of the
distributed creation and sharing of knowledge in public space can be applied equally to discussions of
scientific, religious or social nature, or any other interests.

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5 Controlling and motivating knowledge synthesis: a collaborative process

One of the criticisms of blogs is that they provide personal opinions of their authors; typically one
individual. Certainly, one use of blogs is to vent opinions. For the everyday ‘researcher’ looking, for
example, for advice on which product to buy, these kinds of personal views can be useful. For more
traditional forms of research, however, unmediated personal opinion is to be avoided. The criticism lies in
the fact that there seems no way of knowing whether any one blog entry has been properly fact-checked
and that its arguments are lucid and relevant.

There are, however a large number of blogs that do foster knowledge, which helps to illustrate how
people are not necessarily reluctant to share knowledge. For research in the blogosphere to meet the
standards of the research within the academic community (i.e. within university walls), there needs to be
a peer-review system in place. Permalinks, comments and trackback provide a mechanism for this. Blog
posts can be read, linked to and commented on by other bloggers with similar interests. The public
display of the information allows others to view it and comment on it. Facts are checked, arguments are
analysed and sometimes countered by the readers, some of whom may be experts, as in the Bush
memo forgery example.

The same phenomenon also occurs for less sensationalist issues, and it is common for entire
discussions to surround a single blog post. As one blogger says:

‘…it doesn’t matter that I’m not an A-list blogger, [readers of the blog are] still going to call you up on it if
you get it wrong, and if they know about it then you’re not going to get away with it’ (Suw Charman).

As suggested in the quote, it is not necessary to have a large audience in order to gain feedback about
one’s blog entry (an ‘A-list’ blogger is one that is considered to be hugely popular, with many incoming
links and tens, even hundreds, of thousands of hits per day). The key audience comes from other
interested bloggers and regular readers of particular blogs.

So what are the motivations that drive people to invest personal time into sharing their knowledge and
taking the risk of exposing it to public assessment? Bloggers’ motivations vary greatly from person to
person, as one would expect. A blog can be seen as being a personal as well as a public medium and it
has been argued that the success of blogging is partly due to this (Roell 2004). The benefits of blogging,
therefore, can be seen as satisfying both personal and public motivations.

At a personal level, a blog is an efficient way to store and organise information. Blogs are sometimes
described as ‘notepads’ as well as online diaries. For some bloggers, their blog is a way of keeping notes
and useful URLs (web addresses) in an organised way. Blogs can sometimes be used as ‘mental
scratchpads’, with blog posts showing where corrections have been made by digitally ‘crossing out’
unwanted text but still allowing it to be seen. This is a common practice amongst bloggers that also
enables readers to see how the author’s ideas have changed. Many bloggers categorise each post as
they publish it, allowing all posts of a particular category to be viewed at once. Recent software
announcements have marked the beginning of a desktop search software war, with statements declaring
that currently it is ‘easier to search 6 billion documents on the internet than it [is] to find a single file on
your hard drive’ (Washington Post 2004). Since blogs are archived by search engines, bloggers can take
advantage of their intelligent search algorithms, making it easier to find past blog entries, and creating an
attractive way to store and retrieve information.

Bloggers can also link to posts from other blogs, connecting their own ideas with those of others. In fact,
this very connection of knowledge can enable creation of new knowledge (Roell 2004):

‘…you’re trying to synthesise an original viewpoint from the different angles that you’ve read…’ (Suw
Charman).

Blogging can simply be about people researching and writing about a subject that interests them.
Although bloggers do research in order to write a post, that research is not considered a chore, but
rather a pleasure.

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‘…it’s really just like anyone else would sit down in front of the television evening news, it’s just me out of
interest looking at stuff...’ (‘Matthew’, blogging since 2000).

The reward for doing this is the cognition that it encourages, allowing new thoughts to develop.

‘…the more I write, the more I think about stuff…’ (Suw Charman)

‘…sometimes having started [to write] a weblog post, I think in order to finish it, I need to look at least at
stuff that I might not have otherwise looked at.’ (‘Matthew’).

The second set of motivations lies in the public nature of blogging. The connectivity of the blogosphere
nurtures incentives to keep blogging, such as popularity. The blogosphere can be seen as a playground,
populated by millions of blogs. Many bloggers strive to travel further toward the top of the lists of the
most-read blogs, towards the top of the ‘power curve’ (Barabasi 2002, Shirky 2003).

‘…I felt that people were expecting content and that in order to me to crawl up the power curve, I had to
keep producing content…’ (Suw Charman).

Popularity in this sense can be seen as having a large readership, monitored by site meters which count
the number of times a page is sent from a web server to another computer. It is common to see links on
a blog to web pages displaying this information, allowing anyone who visits the blog to view it.

Another, perhaps more revealing, metric for judging popularity is the number of incoming links a blog
receives. The assumption is that if someone is linking to a blog, then it is an endorsement. Clearly this
may not always be the case, for instance if someone links to a blog in the context of describing how bad
it is. Furthermore, services tracking incoming links only track a proportion of sites on the web due to the
sheer size of the web and limits of tracking technology. Therefore, although ‘disapproving’ links are rare,
using incoming links as a measure of popularity is not entirely accurate. Links seem to be more common
when pointing to something of interest, or to support or disprove an argument. Many services have
arisen around this metric, ranking sites based on their incoming links. As with the site meters mentioned
earlier, bloggers sometimes put links on their sites to these services so others can see how they are
faring in the blogosphere rankings. From the point of view of the blogger, the more links that point to their
blog, the more channels there are directing people to visit, thus increasing the potential for readership.

Nevertheless there is a deeper motivation in clamouring for audience and links. Larger numbers of
visitors bring with them a higher chance of comments and feedback, providing social interaction and the
potential for transfer of knowledge. More prominence leads to increased social capital and access to
knowledge.

‘…if you get something wrong, or people disagree with you, they will tell you…they will blog about it and
go, you know, [you’ve] got this completely wrong, and then that’s useful in itself because it’s a point of
view I haven’t thought of…’ (Suw Charman).

This public collaborative aspect of blogging has something in common with certain other web
developments. A similar, new technology to the blog that is closer to the centre of the debate on the
authority of un-mediated media is the wiki, and in particular Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). A wiki is a
web-based system that allows people to create large numbers of linked web pages very quickly and
easily. Wikipedia is essentially an online encyclopaedia that is created and edited by anyone and
everyone. The way that it works and provides useful information is that there are so many people who
find it useful that they add data to it and correct information when it is found to be incorrect.

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The system works under the same approach as the open source programming that has become so
documented recently. This made its major impact with Linux, an operating system to rival Microsoft’s
Windows operating system. The difference between the two systems is that Linux was produced by a
mass of completely undirected, unpaid and independent programmers, whereas Windows was produced
by a central software house, collectively pumping millions of dollars into the project. The developers who
produced Linux did it entirely in their spare time and at no cost. Linux is in wide use across the globe.

Research in the realm of the blog as well as the wiki is akin to this open source programming. Less
serious uses of blogs have also been made such as collaborative treasure hunts, but nevertheless show
ways in which they can be put to use in real world situations (Lester 2003). Users with a personal interest
in a technology can collectively and collaboratively, in a distributed and largely undirected environment,
provide useful public resources.

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6 Conclusion

This chapter has demonstrated how blogs can enable people to engage in the knowledge society. Blogs
are not limited to use by professional researchers, but can also be used by ordinary people conducting
more everyday research. This is aided by an important feature of blogs: their accessible and public
nature. Bloggers’ willingness to share and connect information works towards creating a mass of experts
and novices where all benefit.

Larger organisations, such as All Consuming, also help to make connections, pooling information found
in blogs to make useful resources for research. Although blogs are a distributed medium, services that
take advantage of the diversity of the blogosphere can forage for information and collate it into
meaningful repositories. These links that services as well as individual people form between blogs help
to create a network that allows information to spread rapidly and virally. The diversity in the blogosphere
also plays a key role in allowing ideas to spread into new domains. The links act as channels through
which communication and collaboration can occur, allowing groups of bloggers to work towards a
common goal.

Blogs can act as a door into the knowledge society. They enable people to accumulate knowledge as
well as share and manage it. But blogs are merely tools; they are not a golden ticket into the knowledge
society. Knowledge is synthesized by communication between people sharing objectives. Blogs facilitate
this by making people easier to find, and providing immediate and direct communication channels once
contacts have been established. Many people keep blogs and therefore there is a great variety in the
kind and quality of knowledge available. Commenting and linking between posts enables visible and
public feedback that can expose flaws in an argument and point to better, more accurate sources. Blogs
have evolved components that better facilitate communication between readers and authors. This
increased ability to communicate helps to foster collaboration between bloggers, as well as forming
diverse types of community that can engage in activities such as research and problem solving. This
chapter has used some current affairs examples of how bloggers achieve this by bringing resources
together and sharing knowledge to jointly further their common understanding of a topic. But similar
patterns of communities voluntarily working towards a common goal can be seen in other blogging topics
too, as well as in the open source movement, suggesting that new tools may be encouraging a cultural
shift.

Another important aspect of this chapter has been an exploration of the motivations that keep bloggers
blogging. Bloggers do not merely publish information, but also use the blogosphere as a source for
increasing their own knowledge and supporting or disproving their claims. We have seen that blogs can
be used as notepads for exploring one’s own thoughts and ideas, but also as notice boards for allowing
others to contribute and to develop ideas. Blogging is a significant part of a new culture of voluntary,
contributive and collaborative participation that, despite being distributed in structure, can be highly
focused in organisation.

A large number of blogs, perhaps the majority, are not about research or collaboration. There is,
however, an important subset (still a substantial number) that do participate in research and/or
collaboration. These communities provide insights into how research can be conducted in public space
without the support structures present in universities.

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7 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many individuals who agreed to be interviewed about their experience of
blogging as part of my unpublished PhD research and in particular those granting kind permission to be
quoted here (anonymity has been preserved where requested, thus names given in quotes here are
fictitious). I would also like to thank the ESRC and BT for providing the funding for this research.

Cross reference to Figure 1.

Figure 1:

Typical layout of a blog

Figure 2

: Screenshot from the Chocolate N’ Vodka blog showing 3 posts (

provided by kind permission of Suw

Charman)

. [1] shows date that the post was written. [2] Title of post, author’s name and exact date and time when post was

created. [3] comments and permalink (described here in full as ‘Permanent Link’, see below). [4] Reference and link to a post on

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another blog. Words underlined are hyperlinks. From chocnvodka.blogware.com, a blog by Suw Charman which has been running

since 2003.

Politically Correct Interventionism

The first black female Secretary of State testified yesterday at her confirmation hearing that
we now have an adjunct to the infamous “Axis of Evil” -- the

Outposts of Tyranny

"To be sure, in our world there remain outposts of tyranny and America stands with
oppressed people on every continent ... in Cuba, and Burma (Myanmar), and North Korea,
and Iran, and Belarus, and Zimbabwe."

You'll note that this new grouping of targets is geographically and ethnically diverse: a
multicultural rainbow coalition of bad guys. Cuba -- Hispanic. Burma -- Asian. Belarus --
European. Zimbabwe -- African. Iran and North Korea are thrown in as reminders..

But this is an encouraging development:

she left out Russia

. Although I'm sure that was just

oversight

, to be corrected

shortly

Blog posting bringing together many different articles into a single posting (the words in bold are links
to other articles)

(From antiwar.com/blog)

Normal text

. Cross reference to

Error! Reference source not found.

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