Finally, I am catching up with literature about blogs. Academic papers are harder to find, but there is abundance of articles about blogs written by (prominent) bloggers.

One of them "What We're Doing When We Blog" is written by Meg Hourihan in 2002 (06/13/2002.)

Much water has flowed under the bridges since 2002 but the enthusiasm and emotional involvement is pretty much the same.

The basic argument is the following: More and more articles about blogging appear these days. Most authors are in "unenviable" position of describing blogs based on observation, not experience. [I wonder what if scientists always tried to experience what they studied?] Those who are not bloggers don't get it and bloggers themselves should talk about their own evolution.

Common ground for blogs - the format (short posts, reverse chronological order, permalinks.) It shapes all social interactions associated with blogging. Bloggers use blogs to link to friends and rivals and to comment on what they're doing.

It's interesting how bloggers are contrasted with non-bloggers. "We blog ... we're united ... we use tools ... etc."

In blogs readers always deal with the newest information (sense of immediacy.) Organization of information is independent of its topic. Blogger is not what he writes about, it's how he writes ("frequently, ad nauseam, peppered with links.")

When I am reading manifestos like this one the word "graphomania" keeps coming to my mind (definition: a passion or urge to write; also called scribomania.) The question is if there were always so many people with urge to write or is it the Zeitgeist...

The title of the qualifying paper defended today in SLIS by Kathryn La Barre is long:
Faceted Maps of Knowledge and Domains: "Peeling the Onion of an Idea," an Examination of the use of Facet Analysis in Website Design.

Qualifying paper is basically a research agenda for the doctoral dissertation. Below is the short summary of the presentation.

The facet classification as an application for libraries goes somewhere back to the beginning of the XX century. The current timeline starts with the post by P. Merholz "Innovation in classification", followed by an extensive discussion that ended up in creating a faceted classification discussion list.
What it actually means is that information architects (who are web development practitioners clearly distinguishing themselves from designers and programmers) turned to the good old theory to guide their work.

There are two examples of using faceted classifications in webdesign: faceted search and faceted navigation (Images of England and CompUsa correspondingly). The former one allows setting a number of parameters for search, the latter one provides browsing by many categories.)

Research questions:
1. How has Facet Analysis been used in the architecture of websites?
2. Does the use of Facet Analysis mark a shift in the base stucture of websites?
3. Might the current use of Facet Analysis on the Web demonstrate its potential for Information Retrieval and other areas?

Faculty members made some observations that these questions are broad and it might be necessary to narrow them down as well as to operationalize what is a shift and the base structure of websites.

Methods:
- Content Analysis
- Survey
- Interview
- Usability testing
- Transaction log analysis

The theoretical framework for this research is B. Hjorland's domain-analytic approach (JASIST, 53, 4, p.257.)  It might be a valuable framework (I need to read the paper closely myself as it talks about discourse communities a lot) but Kathryn didn't give a good answer on the question "How your research benefits from this framework?"

As in many cases with web studies, it seems that this research will require a lot of efforts to connect simple statistics and practical evaluations of websites with "real" theory. At the same time, it will be very interesting to see the results of this research.

The paper "I'm Blogging This": A Closer Look at Why People Blog" submitted to the Communications of the ACM is more of exploratory nature. It is rather an essay than research. It gives some insights and generates ideas but doesn't provide any rigorous and scientifically justified results.

The paper reports results of the ethnographic study of so called "ordinary" bloggers.

The goal is to uncover range of motivations for creating and maintaining blogs and to provide suggestions for improving current blogging tools.

Sample:
23 people, 16 men and 7 women. Initial list created by Google search on Stanford University portal, then the sample is "snow-balled" by asking initial bloggers to name other bloggers.
Method:
Interviews with bloggers (no questionnaire provided), text analysis of blog posts (no coding scheme)
Findings:
Major motivations for blogging: documenting the author's life, providing commentary and opinions, expressing deeple felt emotions, working out ideas through writing, and forming communities.

These motivations (except the last one) are also right for diaries and journals, so we don't particularly get an answer to "Why people blog." Indeed, why would one bother about publishing all this if one can simply keep it on the hard drive? The paper suggests that there is a great need for and awareness of the audience among bloggers. This is a point where it seems necessary to go further.

Why are there so many people who need to be heard? Are they lonely, misunderstood, underestimated? Do they want to prove something? Or may be the intention to keep a diary is amplified (modified) by the technology itself? How did they learn about blogs? Why and how did they make the decision to blog? Did they consider other possibilities? Did they keep a diary before?

Well, these and others are the questions for my imaginary study.

As for design issues, the paper recommends the following (among others):

1. Greater ease of use, editing and management.
2. Integration with online communication and document management tools.
3. Advanced search within and across blogs, blogs categorization and organization tools.
4. Quality assurance (subjective assesments by readers).

Unexpectedly I found some interesting and relevant things on the Lilia Efimova's blog "Mathemagenic" (actually, she has two blogs: this one in English and another one, Edges, in Russan.)

I don't particularly like the motto "Giving birth to learning", but there are interesting links on Mathemagenic:

• Steve Denning has a blog where he publishes excerpts from his coming book "A Leaders Guide to Storytelling." (extremely relevant for me)
• The category WeblogResearch where I found this seemingly interesting paper
  de Moor, A. & Efimova, L. (2004). An argumentation analysis of weblog conversations. Proceedings of the 9th International Working Conference on the Language-Action Perspective on Communication Modelling (LAP 2004), New Brunswick, NJ, 2-3 June 2004.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911), Chapters from a Life , ch. 4:

"Write, if you must; not otherwise. Do not write, if you can earn a fair living at teaching or dressmaking, at electricity or hod-carrying. Make shoes, weed cabbages, survey land, keep house, make ice-cream, sell cake, climb a telephone pole. Nay, be a lightning-rod peddler or a book agent, before you set your heart upon it that you shall write for a living.... Living? It is more likely to be dying by your pen; despairing by your pen; burying hope and heart and youth and courage in your ink-stand."