The Language of Blogs

Twitter Practices: Reality Check

We are holding a conference about Twitter at Lancaster University 10-12 April (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/twitter_and_microblogging/index.htm). Most of the papers will be academic analyses of the discourse of Twitter.  But we thought it would be exciting to have some interaction with people who regularly use Twitter. So we are planning to have a virtual panel via Twitter leading up to Thursday 11 April, using the hashtag #LUtwitRC.

We are inviting people from a range of fields, to illustrate the wide ranges of uses to which Twitter is put in different communities, and we have focused on people who have something to say about the medium in which they work.  We are inviting people who

• have between 1000 and 10000 followers
• post regularly,
• and are all entertaining writers in the 140-character form.

We have invited panelists, but anyone who uses Twitter regularly can join in.  We’ll start it off with some questions. Participants at the conference would be discussing the tweets online from 4:15 to 5:15 pm (16:15-17:15) UK time on 11 April.

Issues in the discussion might include:

• Writing: Where does micro-blogging fit in your other writing activities (print journalism, blog, academic articles, books, talks)?
• Time: How do you possibly have time for Twitter?  How often do you check it? When do most of your responses come in?
• Form: How do you use visuals? Links?  Is the length limit a problem or an opportunity?
• Audience: Do you ever find a message misfires or gets misinterpreted?  Because of the compression?  Or the multiple audiences?  How important are retweets in your feed?
• Following: Name two or three Twitter feeds you think are really well written.

We promise no rewards other than the expectation of some interesting interactions and new followers.  If you would like to participate, just let me know, and I will put up background on panel participants.

Greg Myers

g.myers@lancs.ac.uk

@GregMyers

[for the LUtwit team: Julia Gillen, Diane Potts, and Johnny Unger]

Department of Linguistics and English Language

Lancaster University

Tweeting Science: Compiling a Reference Corpus

I am making claims about scientists' use of Twitter, so I need a corpus of non-scientists' tweets for comparison. But there is a big issue with all collections of Twitter data:  what constitutes a representative sample?  Literary scholars can restrict appeal to a canon for their selection of texts.  Samples of blogs often focus on those that get the most links; samples of academic texts often choose the highest-impact journals in a field, or heavily-cited papers;  samples of news often go to newspapers with large circulations or those that make some claim to be newspapers of record.  But the Twitter feeds with the most followers are celebrities, and in some ways they are the least typical;  they may be doing something quite different from the writers that interest me.

My science Twitter feeds are to some degree about their scientific field, so I looked for non-science feeds that were focused on specialist topics (wine, food, horses, dogs, parenting, transport).  Also, my science Twitter writers each had about 1000 to 5000 followers, showing they were popular and consistent enough to attract readers far beyond their friends and connections, but not so popular that they were mainly science journalists or popularisers.  So I started by looking for non-science Twitter feeds that had a similar number of followers.  I searched the topic lists at We Follow and Twitter for various non-science topics.  I threw out those that had too many or too few followers, those that posted infrequently, or that were just adjuncts to a blog or other site.  I ruled out the feeds that claimed to be written by dogs.  And I came up with this list:

@alicefeiring - American who writes about natural wines.

@anniemole - Blog name of the writer of the great Going Underground blog, about the London transit system; her day job seems to be working for a foodie web site.

@cliffysmom - Nancy J. Bailey, an American who writes about and paints pictures of horses.

@EnglishMum - mostly about food and travel, not parenting.

‏ @dogloversdigest - Kevin Myers, dog breeding and training.

@mochadad - American writing about parenting and dating.

@paulawhite - An American teacher of English.

@SecondAveSagas - one of several Twitter feeds by Benjamin Kabak, this one focuses on the New York transit system.

‏ @shunafish - Shuna Fish Lydon, a New York pastry chef.

@woodswines - Simon Woods, a British wine writer.

Of course many other selections would be possible, and there is perhaps some personal bias here: food, wine, cities, but no politics, music, sports, or celebrity gossip.  But it was important that these people have some sort of expertise in their specialist areas, so that they might be doing something roughly comparable to the scientists using Twitter.

I wanted to keep them in separate files, so I couldn't just follow them and copy out the feed as it appeared in my box. I took about 10,000 words of each feed, to compare with the sample of ten science bloggers. There are problems with this approach to collecting the sample and preparing a corpus, but I'll come to them in another post.

 

Independent scholars, web visibility, and Academia.edu

Not quite blogs, but a related topic:

I have been thinking about the visibility and invisibility of researchers on the web.  I have been thinking about this because, in editing the journal, I spend a lot of time contacting potential referees of articles.  If I can’t think of anyone on a specific topic offhand, or find someone on our Editorial Board, I usually look for other people who have written on the topic, in articles cited by the author or found in Google Scholar.  I get the name and the institution they were at when they wrote the article (maybe in 1995 or 2005) and search.  Usually that works, because academics in full-time employment at universities are pretty well represented on the web.  Some institutions, such as the Open University, won’t give an e-mail address, but usually they give enough detail on publications so that I can tell if this is a plausible person to referee on this topic or not, and I can find an e-mail address somewhere else.

That all works if the researcher has stayed at the same institution for most of their working life, as I have.  But of course many of the researchers who have written on just what I need (say, sit coms in Estonia, or deictic expressions in text messages) have moved.  They could have been research associates, or graduate students, or assistant professors without tenure, or teaching fellows, and they could be working doing something very different from what they wrote about, or they could have retired.  Or they could have gotten a better job somewhere else.  And it may be that universities are tightening up about just who is associated with them. At Lancaster it used to be common to offer an honorary research fellowship to someone who had been involved in research there but had moved on;  then the university declared that such positions could not be offered to anyone who had previously worked at the university, so anyone searching for these people will find nothing, even though they are most strongly associated with Lancaster.

If universities are good about recording who is there, they are very bad at recording anything about people who used to be there;  they seem to delete their web pages as soon as the office is empty and the key is returned.  It would be so nice if they just left a note:  ‘Dr. Media was just teaching that year at Sorry U., but maintains his interest in Estonian sitcoms, and can be reached at DrMedia@gmail.com” or “Professor Deixis is happily retired from the tensions of Worry U., is busy with her allotment, and really doesn’t want to hear about what tasks you have to offer her, so don’t bother.”  That would be better than nothing.

Then I began to think of this problem from the other side, the academic wanting to be found rather than the editor wanting to find them.  I began to think about this when I saw an author who did have a job but gave as her web page an Academia.edu address.  Others have a page dedicated to their topic hosted on some other service, or a Google site.  There might be many reasons to do this: university web pages are more and more centrally controlled, and one might not be able to present one’s work or update it as one wished.  Or one might prefer to be associated with one’s interesting topic or group, rather than one’s employer.  Or one might be going through a series of short-term or part-time jobs, and not want to have one’s web identity tied to some institution that just pays you the minimum possible per hour of marking.

I signed up on Academia.edu because this site came up frequently at the top of Google searches.  It does a lot of what one might hope for maintaining a web presence:  e-mail, CV, links to papers.  One could sign up as “Independent Scholar”, or as an ex of your old university.  Of course the problem is that the person searching has to be on Academic.edu too, but that may become more common. I’d be interested in any comments on whether it works for keeping up contacts.

Tweeting Science: week 1 - compiling a corpus

I'm returning to this blog to make some notes about a new project, a paper on 'Tweeting Science'.  It began as a paper at 'Writing Research Across Borders II' at George Mason University (abstract here, see p. 33). That was almost a year ago, so you see how long it takes me to write something up for publication.  Twitter was an afterthought in a proposed paper on blogs, but as I worked on it it seemed like the more interesting data.  Twitter also seems more relevant to what most scientists are doing now.  Science blogs were big a few years ago;  the science blogosphere began to fragment in June 2010, and many of the bloggers I was following are no longer posting regularly.  Those that remain have become much more straightforward professional science journalism.  But all the tweeters I studied last year are still at it, regularly, and Twitter seems like a key part of their professonal practice.  So I am going back to those tweeters, adding more, and studying Twitter practices more centrally.

More about my research questions for next week.  This week I was mainly working on getting together a corpus.  The corpus I had for WRAB was, as with many rushed conference presentations, too small and too careless.  I had simply copied and pasted the feed of tweets.  But there are several problems with this:

• I lost the conversations with other tweeters - probably irrelevant for the corpus as a database, but problematic when I later want to come back and look more closely at specific tweets. 
• I included the words that are put there by Twitter, what I am calling the frame: for example Reply, Retweet, Favorite, dates.  I thought I could just get away with ignoring these very frequent words, but of course they throw off the relative frequencies of other words.
• I hadn't been very systematic in my choice of Twitter feeds.  As it turns out, they were good choices, but I didn't think enough about criteria for inclusion.

So I went back to those feeds, all still very active, deleted one, and added more.  I started with the 'science' categories in WeFollow and Science Pond by Sawhorse Media. My criteria were:

• must be a practicing researcher (not necessarily at a university of course);  the science tweets with the most followers are usually science jorunalists or communicators, and I needed an active research life for reasons that will be clear.
• must post regularly, so Twitter is clearly a part of their routine.  Just makes it easier to collect enough words.
• more than 1000 followers and (usually) less than 5000.  Tweeters with low numbers of followers are typically doing something different (for instance, social arrangements with friends) where those with over 5000 are usually associated with publishers and institutions, and are serving as a kind of popular science node.
• A range in terms of disciplines (Physics, Biology, Geology, Psychology).
• Men and women, at different stages of their careers from PhD student to FRS, in North America and the UK (because those were the areas where most of the science tweeters were found).  All mainly in English, though some of the tweeters are clearly multilingual.

I came up with these  (with summaries of their Twitter profiles):

@AtheneDonald - Athene Donald, Professor of Physics at Cambridge

@attilacsordas - Attila Csordas, bioinformatician at European Bioinformatics Institute

@deevybee - Dorothy Bishop, Professor of Experimental Psychology at Oxford

@DNLee5 - Banielle N. Lee, biologist, urban ecologist, and science outreach, Scientific American blogger, apparently at a university in Oklahoma

@highlyanne - Anne jefferson, watershed hydrologist at University of North Carolina at Charlotte

@scicurious - anonymous but very well known blogger (currently Neurotic Physiology at http://scientopia.org/blogs/scicurious/).  'She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at a celebrated institution that is very fancy'

@clasticdetritus - Brian Romans, assistant professor of Geology at Virginia Tech (industry experience before that), another well-known blogger

 @DoctorZen - Zen Faulkes, Associate professor at The University of Texas-Pan American, studies the neurophysiology of crustaceans and has several blogs (including an excellent one critiquing conference posters)

@sc_k - Sarah Kavassalis, 'Permanent student of mathematics, physics and, sometimes, the philosophy of their intersection' (Department of Physics, University of Toronto)

@aetiology - Tara C. Smith, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, University of Iowa

@KamounLab - The group of Sophien Kamoun at The Sainsbury Lab, Norwich UK (Biology).

@systemsbiology - Steve Watterson, a research fellow at Edinburgh Uni working in systems biology. 

I realised I was creating a kind of snowball sample, since I was following up people who posted interesting tweets on a page I was sampling.  So each of these feeds is followed by at least one of the others, and in the case of @scicurious, most of the others.  But I don't think that overlapping is a problem for what I am studying.  I would like to add a wider range of disciplines - maybe chemistry, some medical imaging, other areas of physics - but I can do that when I scale up from 50K to 100K words.

Now the reference corpus.

 

 

 

 

 

Blogging linguists II

Back in August 2006, I listed some blogs by linguists.  Most of them are still going in 2009, and they are kept up rather better than my blog.  I asked then whether PhD students who blogged this well would ever find time to finish their dissertations, so I am happy to see that the author of the excellent Tenser, said the Tensor has. 

A couple posts ago, I got a comment from Carole at Bloglingua, which made me think I need to update that list.  Bloglingua is from a translation services company, so they are linguists in the more popular sense of the word:  they know languages and use them professionally. From the Bloglingua blogroll, I found Transubstantiation and Blogos, which are also about translation, and are also regularly updated with lively language stories.

When I made my first list, I somehow missed Separated by a Common Language, by Lynne Murphy at the University of Sussex, perhaps because her blog was new then. And as her title suggests, she has a specific focus:

So, when you heard about a blog on British and American English, did you think: 'There's a blogger who's going to run out of material soon'? If only! I've written more than 300 posts on BrE and AmE over the past three-and-a-bit years, have 92 messages in my inbox requesting discussion of other (often MANY other) topics that I've not yet covered . . .

I come across (or produce) lots of examples of UK/US differences. Here's one:  when I say in my northwest US accent that my wife is going to her writing group, British people think it will be something to do with horses - unless they know my wife.  Like anyone from the US living in the UK (or presumably the other way around), I have a store of these examples, but I have never treated them with Murphy's thoroughness and skill, even when I briefly taught a course on the subject.  And she performs the service of listing both US and UK commentators on language, in lists that overlap with mine a bit. 

There is another list that is still updated at The Linguist List, but it is rather a mixed bag.

Blogging has moved on since 2006.  I didn't think I would find any linguistic Twitterers, but 40 people do find useful things to say at Linguistics Twibe.   Well, there are mostly queries and announcements;  apparently it does take more than 140 characters to say something about linguistics (I usually find the 8,000 words of a journal article rather restricting). 

There is a wonderful Twitter project linked to a study by my colleague Julia Gillen and Nigel Hall of Manchester Met:  it sends the message found on an Edwardian postcard every day. I've subscribed  because it seems like an excellent way to think about the similarities and differences between the two media for short texts, postcards and Twitter.  Julia and Cath Booth have even figured out a way to include the pictures.

web

Parked near St. Just, Cornwall

To Blog: A Transitive Verb?

It is unusual to use the verb 'to write' (or its French equivalent) as an intransitive, so unusual that Roland Barthes was being provocative and witty when he titled an essay, 'To Write:  An Intransitive Verb?' One writes something, a book or a letter or a poem. In contrast, the verb 'to blog' seems to be more often intransitive (I haven't actually done a corpus study). One can blog from somewhere (a fair or convention) or about something (politics or football), but one doesn't blog something, one just blogs, as an activity in itself.

When one does blog something, the implication is often that one is doing something different from most blogs, committing oneself to a finite project with a single focus. Julie Powell's The Julie/Julia Project, on which Nora Ephron's current movie is based, is probably the best-known example in the moment – all 536 recipes from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year.  One of my favourite blogs, 101 Cookbooks, apparently started in a similar way, as Heidi Swanson's attempt to explore the cookbooks she already had before buying any more - though she continued after she finished with her shelf of books.

In most of the examples of blogging something that I have come across, that something is a complex text.  But to say one is blogging that text, one is saying more than that it is one's subject matter;  one is implying that it will be transformed by the form of the blog, a personal response given in short date-stamped messages rather than an essay or a book.  If one blogs about the Bible, one could comment on anything and everything to do with the Bible, but if one says one is Blogging the Bible,  as David Plotz set himself to do in Slate, one is apparently committed to reading it (or rather, the part Christians refer to as The Old Testament) through from beginning to end and writing something about every book.  Plotz's project is different from the thousands of Biblical commentaries over two millennia, not only because he does not present himself as an expert or authority, but also because his responses unfold in real time.  He doesn't promise us an overall reading of the whole text;  he will just give us the experience, week by week.

I tried to see if there were other, similar projects out there by Googling 'Blogging the'.  That turned up several projects modelled on Plotz's, such as Ziauddin Sardar's Blogging the Qur'an.  Churches around the world have a go at Blogging the Psalms, but I find most are doing something rather different from Plotz, a series of more traditional meditations or reflections than a project moving through the Book of Psalms over time.  The Talmud Blog  is promising, because some might argue that the Talmud itself, with its commentaries on commentaries, has something blog-like, but blog is a noun rather than a verb here, and it turns out to be about 'Talmudic News, Reviews, Culture, Currents and Criticism', not a project of reading the text.  For readers in search of more secular meditation, there is John Whitfield's Blogging the Origin , in which a science writer tries to convey some of the experience of grappling with a classic but often unread text.  I'm a bit surprised that I can't find a blog in which someone works their way through Marx's Capital, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, or Joyce's Ulysses;  perhaps people feel they would be too vulnerable, exposing their naïve reading of such heavily annotated texts, or setting themselves us for a blog that stops awkwardly on page 82.

Perhaps the best example of blogging as a transitive verb, and the example that started me on this search, is Steve Coll's Blogging the Stimulus in the online version of The New Yorker (and once again I owe the tip to the podcast of On the Media).  Coll says he planned to do what journalists always do, skimming through the bill designed to boost the US economy after the financial crisis, looking for nuggets that might be the basis for an article.  But inspired by Plotz's Blogging the Bible , he made a project of reading every one of the 407 pages, taking 21 posts over five months to bring out many different aspects of the complex legislation. Though most would probably agree that the Stimulus Bill is rather less inspiring than the Bible, the blog is a wonderful exercise leading to many insights, with an appetite for detail worthy of I.F. Stone.

But in some ways, projects like Powell's, Plotz's and Coll's are atypical of blogging.Most blogs go outward, in all directions, taking in a range of links;  that is why they are best thought of in intransitive terms, as an activity having no particular object. Plotz and Coll stick to their one furrow. And their projects, by their nature, are finite; they are like HBO miniseries vs. the soap operas of most continuing blogs. It is perhaps relevant that both Plotz and Coll are professional journalists (as is Whitfield), writing for established media outlets, not novices sharing their ignorance with the world;  they are in some ways writing books in instalments (and indeed Plotz's text has come out as a book).  So it is probably fairer to say that they have used the blog genre to do something it is not usually used to do, but is certainly worth doing. I am on the lookout for more such projects. Google says there is no 'Blogging the Munros', by one of those people who makes a project of the 284 peaks in Scotland that are over 3000 feet tall. I would take it on, but I suppose that the title would imply one was going to climb them, not just write a post about each of them.

 

 

Censoring Wikipedia?

Once again, the WNYC podcast of On the Media alerted me to a media story that was getting more attention in the US than in the UK:  the revelation that Wikipedia had gone along with the blackout on news about the kidnapping of the New York Times reporter David Rohde. Apparently the Times asked Jimmy Wales to intervene personally.  So I took a look at the 'Talk' page on his Wikipedia entry.  That page has about two hours of discussion, before the topic was archived, and redirected to the policy discussion pages, 'The Village Pump'. 

Now I don't know if it was, in fact, necessary to keep news of Rohde's kidnapping out of the media, for his safety.  And I don't have the day-to-day editorial expertise to day whether Wikipedia needs regular procedures for dealing with this sort of situation (as suggested by some at 'The Village Pump') or whether such a case can only be handled on an ad hoc basis. 

What strikes me reading over the arguments, both the first hot reactions and the later more thoughtful and extensive discussion, is that this debate is different from many other running controversies at Wikipedia.  In my book, I discuss controversies around the article '7 World Trade Center', which turned mainly on issues of which facts were relevant, which sources established these facts, and how they were to be interpreted.  In other controversial articles, for instance 'Vaccination', there is much invocation of Wikipedia Principles.  Here there seems to be a difference between those who see this as a case in which two principles conflict (openness of information vs. protection of a life) and those who see it as a matter of a single absolute principle.

Here is the one mention of earlier attempts to include the information:

Who the hell is removing the bit about him being kidnapped? It's confirmed by several sources and even if it's not on the news, doesn't make it a false statment, someone should really look into this. 218.188.3.124 (talk) 02:32, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

After the news was out, we get exchanges like this:

Be smart don't add kidnapping information that would raise the value of the target to kidnappers. Thanks to wikipedia for doing the right thing. Daniel.Cardenas (talk) 03:46, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, because suppressing information is what the internet is for...... 192.136.16.3 (talk) 13:53, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Some more early comments (edited):

    Wikipedia hits bottom; keeps digging

What happened is just ridiculous. A man's life doesn't justify censorship of informations on Wikipedia. What are good reasons for censorship? The ones that Jimmy Wales chooses? What if someone who has 'power' decides that something must not be published, for his alleged "good reasons". A life perhaps has been saved (are we sure that it was because of the media blackout?), but Wikipedia's neutrality and freedom has been seriously undermined. Not counting the fact that the New York Times editor, with only several phone calls, succeeded in making all the other media not to publish the news...

The suppression of relevant facts to please powerful outside interests proves that this leftist propaganda site is just that. 

I am appalled that Wikipedia would violate its published principles to prevent publishing the truth. It will be the beginning of the end.

These statements  are made with the assumption that others will recognise and agree with the principle at issue.  What is that principle?  That all statements that are true should be published?  That all censorship is wrong?  Or is it a matter of equality:  everyone has the right to post on Wikipedia, and no one person has the right to remove it?  There is certainly a enormous resentment of both Jimmy Wales and the Times. I can understand the resentment of Wales;  Wikipedia is based on the work of many people, and his tendency to intervene in some cases is anomalous.  I have never understood the anger in the blogosphere directed at the Times.  

At least the discussion led me on to a page on the 'Argumentum ad Jimbonem', which is 'the logical fallacy that "what Jimbo said" is The Truth™' ('Jimbo' here being Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia).

Printed blogs

Last week the excellent On the Media (a radio programme and podcast from NPR station WNYC) had an item about The Printed Blog.  This is the reverse of print newspapers that start an on-line version and have their reporters blog;  instead, it is an experiment with taking blog reports, printing them, and distributing them like a newspaper.  Yeah, I thought it an odd idea too.  In my experience, prose that seems great when I see it on-line, freshly written, seems odd in print, either in a book or in a newspaper.  But Josh Karp, the publisher who was interviewed, had a case, saying it allowed for micro-editions that could sell ads specifically for one neighbourhood or another.  And he mentioned something that proponents of print often point out, the convenience and feel of paper.  For all my fascination with blogs, and the excellent writers emerging on them, I still read the weekly version of the Guardian, and among its many pleasures is the way it lies flat on the table.

Bibliography on the language of blogs

This is the Reference list from Blog and Wiki Discourse (Continuum, forthcoming in August).  I've cut all the references to linguistic and media studies texts that don't refer to blogs or wikis.  This includes only studies to which I refer in the text, so it is not a complete bibliography of the field, but it may give some readers ideas of new places to look.  Daniel Holbrook has a much more comprehensive but now dated list from his thesis (and it is an interesting example of how a web-based bibliography can work). 

Allan, S. (2006). Online news:  Journalism and the Internet. Maidenhead, UK, Open University Press.

Baker, N. (2008). The Charms of Wikipedia:  Review of Wikipedia:  The Missing Manual. New York Review of Books 55(4): 6-10.

Baker, S. and H. Green (2008). Beyond blogs:  What business needs to know. Business Week.

Blood, R. (2002a). Introduction. We've Got Blog. J. Rodzvilla. Cambridge, Perseus Publishing: ix-xiii.

Blood, R. (2002b). The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. Cambridge, MA, Perseus.

Blood, R. (2002c). Weblogs:  A history and perspective. We've Got Blog. J. Rodzvilla. Cambridge, MA, Perseus Publishing: 7-16. http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

Boardman, M. (2005). The Language of Websites. London, Routledge.

Broughton, J. (2008). Wikipedia:  The Missing Manual. Sebastopol, CA, O'Reilly Media.

Bruns, A. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond. New York, Peter Lang.

Bruns, A. and J. Jacobs, Eds. (2006). Uses of Blogs. New York, Peter Lang.

Bryant, S., A. Forte, et al. (2005). Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. Group '05. www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/papers/bryant-forte-bruckman-group05.pdf

Crystal, D. (2006). Language and the Internet. (Second Edition) Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.

de Moor, A. and L. Efimova (2004). An Argumentation analysis of weblog conversations. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Language-Action Perspective in Communication Modelling, New Brunswick, NJ.https://doc.telin.nl/dscgi/ds.py/Get/File-41656/lap2004_demoor_efimova.pdf

Doctorow, C., R. Dornfest, et al. (2002). Essential Blogging. Sebastopol, CA, O'Reilly & Associates.

Emigh, W. and S. Herring (2005). Collaborative authoring on the web:  A genre analysis fo two on-line encyclopedias. HICSS - 38, IEEE Press

Gillmor, D. (2004). We the Media. Sebastapol, CA, O'Reilly Media.

Gurak, L. J., S. Antonijevic, et al., Eds. (2004). Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs, http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/.

Herring, S. C., I. Kouper, et al. (2005). Conversations in the blogosphere: An analysis "from the bottom up". Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-38), IEEE.http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/blogconv.pdf

Herring, S. C. and J. C. Paolillo (2006). Gender and genre variation in weblogs. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4): 439-459.

Herring, S. C., L. A. Scheidt, et al. (2004). Bridging the gap: A genre analysis of weblogs. Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-37), IEEE.http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2004/2056/04/205640101b.pdf

Hewitt, H. (2005). Blog:  Understanding the Information Revolution that's Changing Your World. Nashville, TN, Nelson Books.

Jones, J. (2008). Patterns of revision in on-line writing:  A study of Wikipedia's featured articles. Written Communication 25(2): 262-289.

Keren, M. (2006). Blogosphere:  The New Political Arena. Lanham, MD, Lexington Books.

Kline, D. and D. Burstein (2005). Blog!  How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture. New York, CDS Books.

Kluth, A. (2006). Among the audience:  A survey of New Media. The Economist. 22 April.  http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?STORY_ID=6794156

Kumar, R., J. Novak, et al. (2004). Structure and Evolution of Blogspace. Communications of the ACM 47(12): 35-39.

Lanier, J. (2006). Digital Maoism: The hazards of the new online collectivism. The Edge. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html

Marlow, C. (2004). Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community. International Communication Association, New Orleans.http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cameron/cv/pubs/04-01.html

Marlow, C. (2006). Linking without thinking: Weblogs, readership and online social capital formation. International Communication Association Conference, Dresden, Germany.http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cameron/cv/pubs/2006-linking-without-thinking

McHenry, R. (2004). The Faith-Based Encyclopedia. TCSDaily:  Technology, Commerce, Society.  http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=111504A 

Miller, C. and D. Shepherd (2004). Blogging as social action:  A genre analysis of the weblog. Into the Blogosphere:  Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. L. J. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff and J. Reyman.

Miller, D. and D. Slater (2000). The Internet:  An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford, Berg.

Nilsson, S. (2004). A brief overview of linguistic aspects of the blogophere, English Department, Umeå University. http://ilyagram.org/media/fetch/blogspeak.pdf

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