This dissertation examines weblog community as a materially afforded and socially constructed space. In a set of three case studies, this dissertation examines three separate weblog communities between 2004 and 2008. CASE STUDY I looks at knowledge management bloggers in order to better understand how bloggers form communities. In this case study, it will be shown that blogs group thematically and in temporal bursts. These bursts of thematic activity allow for movement in and out of a community, as well as act as a bridge between different weblog communities. CASE STUDY II examines two pseudonymous bloggers in order to better understand how presentation and identity is understood in blogging. It will be shown in CASE STUDY II that social identity in weblog communities is negotiated through blogging practices such as transparency in writing and truthful presentation. CASE STUDY III delves further into social identity by examining a community of academic bloggers and how traditional, institutionalized expectations influence social identity over time, and if this influence differs in the core and periphery of the community. It will be shown in CASE STUDY III that there is indeed a difference in how social identity is negotiated and performed between core and periphery members of a weblog community. Finally, a model towards an integrated approach to researching blogs is put forth.

This article will deconstruct the social identity pseudonymous blogger through the mapping of identity elements in the presentation posts of two bloggers, and compare these identity elements to a sample of the mass media's presentation of the same two bloggers. I begin this chapter by setting the discourses of diary writing and journalism in historical contexts and relate these contexts to the practice of blogging. I will then argue that the two discourses inform the categories cultural projections and societal currents in Norris' (2004) multimodal framework. I then use Scollon and Scollon's (2004) nexus analysis and Norris' (2004) multimodal framework in order to examine the blogs BitchPhd and Belle de Jour. The aim is to examine the construction of pseudonymous social identities in action, and to map the construction of pseudonymous social identities in action, and how these constructions dictate, and are dictated by, social practices.

The YouTube video sharing site is used by huge numbers of young people in the roles of consumers as well as producers of content and meaning. The site hosts an extremely large amount of video clips, and its users represent a wide variety of nationalities, religions, ethnic backgrounds, identities and lifestyles. These facts make it hard to see how a tangible sense of actual community could be created within the site. Using on- and offline ethnographic data in the form of footage, interviews and patterns of community interaction (favoriting, subscribing, commenting, rating, and video replies), this chapter presents the results of a case study that aims to analyze how a specific interest group with a certain national anchoring (Swedish parkour youth) deal with the vastness and complexity of YouTube in creating a sense of identity and community in relation to their specialized interest.

This poster will present the methodology behind the creation of a linguistic corpus based on a subset of the 2007 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media dataset. Posts from a small group of political bloggers were tagged for parts of speech and indexed into a corpus using the program Xairia. From this corpus, the political blogger subset will be investigated for register and referential information. Referential information,especially with regards to new and given information, will be compared against network placement both to identify network innovators as well as to compare network placement as a catalyst for innovation. The final section, Further Research, will outline the modifications necessary for the creation of a full-scale corpus based on the entire ICWSM 2006 dataset.

Contrary to the utopian expectation that the Internet will lift the poor out of squalor, erase differences and finally let men and women compete on equal footing, there are clear power differences present online. In many online interactions, anonymity is being abandoned in favor of real profiles, community building and networking. Once this anonymity has been abandoned, however, members of these communities must negotiate ways of interacting with one another. Often online communication among members of the same community is a seamless discourse between parties. Exploration of the points at which these interactions break down can provide valuable insight into the underlying culture of the community. This paper will explore underlying structures of gender and power through a sociolinguistic analysis of the weblog discourse surrounding the Kathy Sierra death threat case.

This article suggests an alternative, non-linear approach to identifying traces of community in weblog networks. Further, this paper addresses the ethnographic problem of participation observation as one author was a member of the community and one was not. Significant differences in the reading of artifacts were addressed in relation to this problem. It was concluded in this paper that weblogs form networks with large periphery membership and a strong thematically-based core with ‘fuzzy’ or fluid boundaries. These fluid boundaries allow for membership in the periphery to incorporate bloggers who blog about similar themes, while maintaining a strong reciprocal thematically linked core.