The recently published collection Into the Blogosphere features various essays about blogs. The issues explored include genre, gender, identity, community, communication and design. Most of the essays are based on literature reviews and personal experiences. Few of them provide empirical data and analyses. One paper worth mentioning (except the one where I am a co-author :) is "Blogging as social action: A genre analysis of the weblog." by Miller and Shepherd.

Authors start with description of the context of the blog origins, its kairos, or cultural space-time:

• Increase in general interest in ordinary people's life and in private moments
• Blending boundaries between public and private
• Increasing access to various information
• Increasing voyeuristic tendencies; rise of mediated voyeurism (promoted by three factors according to Calvert, 2000: pursuit of truth in info-saturated world, desire for excitement, need for involvement.)

Interesting fact that contributes to kairos: in 1997 among 15 top-selling hardcover books four were personal memoirs - Angela's Ashes, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Into Thin Air, The Man Who Listens to Horses.

The authors claim that they examined numerous blogs and talks about blogs (no actual data provided) and discuss three features of the blog as genre: semantic content, syntactic or formal features, pragmatic value.

Semantic content (NB: semantic - related to meaning, content - topics or matter; can content be syntactic or pragmatic?):
Blogs can be categorized in various ways, e.g. by topics, by media (text, photos, videos, etc.), by style (filter vs. personal)
Formal features:
Blogs take many forms, but the format (frequency of updates, dated entries, links, comments) is one for all.
Pragmatic actions:
Self-expression and community. Self-expression functions for self-clarification, self-validation, enhancing self-awareness and confirming already held beliefs. Self-expression also contributes to relationship development and social control (opinion manipulation.)

Then the authors discuss preceding genres and divide them by branches. On the filtering branch are the log, the commonplace book, the wunderkammer, clipping service, and anthology. On the branch of political journalism are the pamphlet, the editorial, the opinion column. On the separate branch are the journal, the diary, the homepage and the webcam (?). Diaries are accounts of actual experience of the author and can provide a view on history and portray a self. Considering that blog as a genre shares many features with preceding genres, the authors argue that the blog as a complex rhetorical hybrid with imprints from all these prior genres comes to existence because of the "widely shared, recurrent need for cultivation and validation of the self."

I wouldn't say this analysis provides a solid description of the blog as a genre. Most features except formal are non-distinctive. The only stable thing is a common format, which means that the ground for genre definition is the technology (the format, as many authors point out), not the writing itself. Probably, this is how genre analysis in computer-mediated communication should be approached: the technology provides a format, a container and it gets filled with as much and as diverse content as possible.

Also, an interesting idea in the last part of the paper that the blog is a counter-movement to postmodern destabilization needs to be empirically verified (as many statements about blogs.)