The Language of Blogs

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

Nowson, S. (2006). The Language of Weblogs:  A Study of Genre and Individual Differences. School of Informatics. Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh.

O'Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0. http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/1113http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Pfeil, U., P. Zaphiris, et al. (2006). Cultural differences in collaborative authoring of Wikipedia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(1).

Posteguillo, S. (2003). Netlinguistics:  An Analytical Framework to Study Language, Discourse and Ideology in Internet. Castelló de la Plana, Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I.

Priedhorsky, R., J. Chen, et al. (2007). Creating, destroying, and restoring value in Wikipedia. Group '07, Sanibel Island, Florida.http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~reid/papers/group282-priedhorsky.pdf

Project for Excellence in Journalism (2006). The State of the News Media.  http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.com/2006/

Rodzvilla, J., Ed. (2002). We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture. Cambridge, MA, Perseus Books.

Rosenzweig, R. (2006). Can History Be Open Source?  Wikipedia and the Future of the Past. The Journal of American History: 117-146.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody:  The Power of Organizing without Organizations. London, Allen Lane.

Singer, J. B. (2006). Journalists and news bloggers:  Complements, contradictions, and challenges. The Uses of Blogs. A. Bruns and J. Jacobs. New York, Peter Lang: 23-32.

Stone, B. (2004). Who Let the Blogs Out?:  A Hyperconnected Peek a the World of Weblogs. New York, St. Martins.

Thelwall, M. (2003). What is this link doing here? Beginning a fine-grained process of identifying reasons for academic hyperlink creation. Information Research 8(3): 151.

Tosca, S. P. (2000). A Pragmatics of Links. Journal of Digital Information 1(6): Article No. 22, 2000-06-27.  http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v01/i06/Pajares/

Viégas, F., M. Wattenberg, et al. (2004). Studying cooperation and conflict between  authors with history flow visualisations. CHI 2004.http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf

Viégas, F., M. Wattenberg, et al. (2007). Talk before you type: coordination in Wikipedia. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/papers/wikipedia_coordination_final.pdf

 

Academic Studies of Wikipedia

Am I right in thinking Wikipedia gets better studies than blogs? If it is true, it may be because it provides such great data for a study. I used to spend hours and days and weeks comparing two versions of a poem or an essay or a scientific article. So I am astonished to find that Wikipedia has a history page with all previous versions lined up (that alone can take a literary scholar weeks), and then it will compare any two versions and point out the changes. And it says who made the changes, and links to their page, where one can often find what other edits they have made. This huge body of data has been used by a group at IBM Research Laboratories to make 'History Flow' visualisations that show how an article develops (Viégas, Wattenberg and Dave 2004; Viégas, Wattenberg, Kriss and van Ham 2007). The data have also been used (along with some statistics on page views that one can't find on a Wikipedia history page) by Priedhorsky and his colleagues to show the build-up of information on articles, and the effects of vandalism (Priedhorsky, Chen, Lam, Panciera, Turveen and Riedl 2007). Pfeil, Zaphiris, and Ang correlated the kinds of changes made in the different language editions with traits of national cultures drawn from Hofstede (Pfeil, Zaphiris and Ang 2006). And John Jones has used the information in the editors' comments to categorise the kinds of revisions made (for instance, macro or micro) in featured articles and articles that didn't get FA status (Jones 2008). Emigh and Herring (2005) compare the statistics on article length, word length, and various qualitative stylistic features, for Wikipedia, Everything2 (which I hadn't heard of), and the Columbia Encyclopedia, reminding me that Wikipedia's collaborative process is not the only way to do it.

There have also been studies of authorship that go beyond this huge trove of data. Bryant, Forte, and Bruckman (2005)interviewed Wikipedians, and they show some interesting differences of perspective between novice and experienced users. Rosenzweig (2006) has a thoughtful piece that goes beyond his immediate concern, knowledge about history. (He was the first, I think, to raise issues about the style of Wikipedia entries). There have been many magazine articles on Wikipedia, but he most informative and enthusiastic is the novelist Nicholson Baker's review in the New York Review of Books, which captures some of the obsessional quality of editing (2008). He's reviewing Broughton (2008), which is more than it seems from the title, not just a user's manual, but a thoughtful guide to the phenomenon and the practices of Wikipedians. And of the many books coming out now on Wikipedia, the most interesting comments are from Alex Bruns.

And then there are the critics. Most just give a sort of gut response, without much argument or experience with wikis, but I have found interesting remarks in articles by two experienced editors of print encyclopedias (McHenry 2004; Crystal 2007), and in the comments on criticisms by Jaron Lanier (2006).

Baker, N. (2008). The Charms of Wikipedia. New York Review of Books 55(4): 6-10. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131

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

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. (2007). On not being a speech therapist. DCBlog.  http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html

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

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

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

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

Pfeil, U., P. Zaphiris, et al. (2006). Cultural differences in collaborative authoring of Wikipedia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue1/pfeil.html

Priedhorsky, R., J. Chen, et al. (2007). Creating, destroying, and restoring value in Wikipedia. Group '07, Sanibel Island, Florida.  http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~reid/papers/group282-priedhorsky.pdf

Rosenzweig, R. (2006). Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past. The Journal of American History: 117-146

Viégas, F., M. Wattenberg, et al. (2004). Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualisations. CHI 2004

Viégas, F., M. Wattenberg, et al. (2007). Talk before you type: coordination in Wikipedia. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/papers/wikipedia_coordination_final.pdf

Blog books

Amazon writes to tell me that:

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Uses of Blogs (Digital Formations) by Axel Bruns have also purchased The IT Girls Guide to Blogging with Moxie by Joelle Reeder.

That's odd.  Judging by its Amazon description, The IT Girl's Guide to Blogging with Moxie would seem to be a how-to book the with cover of a chick-lit novel, and while I am sure it has all sorts of useful technical information that I should know (and I admit to lacking moxie entirely), I don't really want another how-to book.  On the other hand, I did appreciate Uses of Blogs.  It is a collection edited by two Australian academics, Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs (the latter forgotten by the Amazon automatic message), including a wide range of contributors who know about different applications of blogs in education, the professions, business, and news.  I came to it because I was tracking down publications by Jill Walker (she has her chapter on-line). From my notes:

• Bruns, in his introduction, quotes Clay Shirky saying blogs are not one genre
• Suw Charman uses the term 'Trojan mouse' for a small scale project unnoticed by the boss, like Inkytext at my university.
• Jean Burgess notes the problem students have finding a blog voice in blogs for courses.
• Alexander Halavais replaces any definition of blogging with four themes:  blogs have networked audiences, they encourage conversation, they are a 'low-intensity activty, and they represent 'thinking in progress'. (I feel an exam question coming on:  'Discuss'.).
• Adrian Miles notes how the 'blogginess of the blog' is broken with publication in a book, out if its context, while video and audio content can servive such recontextualisation.
• And at the end, Axel Bruns has a nice quotation from Neil Gaiman that you probably know but I didn't:  'The blogosphere is not organised, but it's really well disorganised.'

So this is the closest to an academic book on blogs that I have seen so far.  It may be that the growing bookshelf on blogs is going to be like the huge bookshelf on advertising:  lots of how-to books, journalistic gee-whiz accounts, and recollections of the famous.  Good copywriters like David Ogilvy and Peter Mayle have a lot to tell non-practitioners like me, but they don't say anything specific about language, and they don't do arguments.  Eventually, advertising discourse got good textbooks like Guy Cook's, but there are still rather few monographs. Since monographs take at least five years, I will probably have to wait awhile for good extended studies of blogs.  I should probably start looking for just-about-to-be-completed PhD dissertations.

Searching for references on the language of blogs

Where can students find references on the language of blogs? I have noted that there are some books, but they are still mostly anecdotes and accounts from bloggers. Even the academic studies, which are slow in coming, have been useful for background but don’t provide a basis for analysis. The first literature search for most students (and last for some of them) is on Google. I have been trying to point them beyond Google, because for most topics they are better off looking at refereed academic journals with more substantial. But blogs are a newish topic in most academic fields, and it takes time for studies to work their way through the process of reviewing and publication. And the people who study blogs are, not surprisingly, good at making their work available free on the web. Most of it is in the form of conference papers, which have at least been refereed by someone.

So a Google Scholar search, with some following up of the references in the papers, and the citations to the papers, will lead to lots of interesting material. Many of the earlier papers are by well-known bloggers (Walker 2001; Blood 2004; Marlow 2004; Marlow 2006; Walker 2006). There are three problems with much of what one finds. Since they are conference papers, they tend to be short and undeveloped, an interesting concept or a bit of data. And very few of them have much to do with linguistics, even when they use words like ‘conversation’ or ‘text analysis’. Most are more interested in computer networks than in discourse. And since they are usually writing for other people in information sciences, they can be rather technical (though they do a good job at framing what they are doing for non-specialists, a lot better than most linguists do).

With those warnings in mind, here are some suggestions. The most active linguist in this area is Susan Herring, who has written and co-written and edited lots of papers on blogs, many of which are accessible from her web page at http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/herring/pubs.html

Let me just recommend two of these papers, a careful analysis of genre that could provide a background for selection of data and for comparisons ((Herring, Scheidt, Bonus and Wright 2004) and a paper on gender that is, I think, the first on blogs in one of the main sociolinguistics or discourse analysis journals (Herring and Paolillo 2006). Two other names keep coming up in my searches, Lilia Efimova, who is doing (has done?) a PhD at the Telematica Instituut in the Netherlands (http://blog.mathemagenic.com/) and Stephanie Hendrick, who is doing a PhD at the University of Umea in Sweden (http://www.sumofmyparts.org/blog/). Their papers often touch on discourse analytical issues, but they are mainly interested in aspects of networking (Hendrick 2003; de Moor and Efimova 2004; Efimova and Hendrick 2005).

Two earlier collections of papers from different fields also provide a good basis. ‘Into the Blogosphere’ is an on-line collection from North American rhetoricians (Gurak, Antonijevic, Johnson, Ratliff and Reyman 2004). The most useful, for me, is co-authored by the genre analyst Carolyn Miller (Miller and Shepherd 2004). There is also a theme issue of Communications of the ACM (Rosenbloom 2004) with accessible articles, including an interesting overview of links (Kumar, Novak, Raghavan and Tomkins 2004).

Some journal articles are beginning to emerge in areas other than information science. It’s worth keeping an eye on the one refereed outlet dedicated to this area, the on-line Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Some recent articles on blogs include (Huffaker and Calvert 2005; Trammell, Tarkowski, Hofmokl and Sapp 2006; Tremayne, Zheng, Lee and Jeong 2006; Thelwall and Stuart 2007). Other titles thrown up by a search include (Hevern 2004; Reed 2005). And I have seen the first of what will probably be many PhD dissertations on blog texts (Mishne 2007). It is about searching blog texts, not about analysing them in relation to language practices, but it is well-written and has many useful insights for more qualitative text analysts.

I wonder if there is a lesson in this searching. It could be that most discourse analysis continues to focus on a few genres, such as political speeches, newspaper articles, scientific research articles, and broadcast news interviews. These could all be called (in a category that Bill Nichols used to talk about documentary film) ‘discourses of sobriety’. It may be that we will have to adapt these well-established lines of analysis of sober genres to more carnivalesque genres such as blogs, YouTube, or reality TV. That is why the analysis of genres is probably the first step in any comparative analysis of blogs: what are they, and what are people doing when they do them?

Blood, R. (2004). "How Blogging Software Reshaped the Online Community." Communications of the ACM. http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/blog_software.html

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

Efimova, L. and S. Hendrick (2005). In Search for a virtual settlement: An exploration of weblog community boundaries. Communities and Technologies 05. https://doc.telin.nl/dscgi/ds.py/Get/File-46041

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

Hendrick, S. (2003). The Function of Language to Facilitate and Maintain Social Networks in Research Weblogs. English Department, University of Umea. http://www.eng.umu.se/stephanie/web/LanguageBlogs.pdf

Herring, S. C. and J. C. Paolillo (2006). "Gender and genre variation in weblogs." Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4): 439-459.Preprint: http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/jslx.pdf

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

Hevern, V. W. (2004). "Threaded identities in cyberspace: Weblogs and positioning in the dialogical self." Identities: An International Journal of Theory and Research 4(4): 321-335

Huffaker, D. A. and S. L. Calvert (2005). "Gender, identity, and language use in teenage blogs." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10(2). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/huffaker.html

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

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

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. http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_as_social_action_a_genre_analysis_of_the_weblog.htmlMishne, G. A. (2007). Applied Analytics for Blogs. Informatics Institute. Amsterdam, NL, University of Amsterdam. http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gilad/phd.html

Reed, A. (2005). "'My blog is me' Texts and persons in online journal culture (and anthropology)." Ethnos 70(2): 220-242

Rosenbloom, A. (2004). "Special Issue: The Blogosphere." Communications of the ACM 47(12)

Thelwall, M. and D. Stuart (2007). "RUOK? Blogging communication technologies during crises." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(2). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue2/thelwall.html

Trammell, K. D., A. Tarkowski, et al. (2006). "Rzeczpospolita blogów [Republic of Blog]: Examining Polish bloggers through content analysis." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue3/trammell.html

Tremayne, M., N. Zheng, et al. (2006). "Issue publics on the web: Applying network theory to the war blogosphere." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue1/tremayne.html

Walker, J. (2001). Do You Think You're Part of This? Digital Texts and the Second Person Address. Cybertext Yearbook 2001. Jyväskylä, FI, University of Jyväskylä. http://hdl.handle.net/1956/1140Walker, J. (2006). Blogging from inside an ivory tower. Uses of Blogs. J. J. Axel Bruns. Bern, Peter Lang. https://bora.uib.no/bitstream/1956/1846/1/Walker-Uses-of-Blogs.pdf

Some readings about blogs

When I began this project, I had just a few academic studies of blogs, and a lot of references that weren't academic but had some insights or background.  Students usually go first to one of the textbooks on language and the internet.  Mark Boardman (2005), The Language of Websites (London:  Longman), barely mentions blogs, but the new edition of David Crystal (2006), Language and the Internet (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press) has a chapter on them.

One reference that comes up a lot in student essays, perhaps because it was for a while the only entry in our library catalogue for ‘blog’, is John Rodzvilla, ed. (2002), We’ve Got Blog (Cambridge, MA:  Perseus Press).  But it is just a collection of short pieces, mostly by bloggers, written in the first couple years of the blog phenomenon.  Parts are still useful (including Rebecca Blood’s ‘Introduction’ and ‘History’, both of which are available on her web site), but it is not much of a start for academic analysis.  Most of the other books I have seen on blogs are either how-to books, such as Cory Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelly Powers, Benjamin Trott, and Mena G. Trott (2002),  Essential Blogging (Sebastopol, CA:  O’Reilly), or collections of articles and interviewsby and about bloggers, such as David Kline and Dan Burstein (2005),  Blog!  How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture (New York: CDS Books).

More serious attention has been given to blogs in relation to news and politics.  Dan Gillmor (2004) We the Media:  Grassroots Journalism by the People for the People (Sebastopol, CA:  O’Reilly) is a journalist’s series of anecdotes, but with very perceptive comments on the difference made by blogs and other ‘citizen journalism’ forms.  Stuart Allan (2006),  Online News: Journalism and the Internet (Maidenhead, UK:  Open University Press), which I just found, is a readable overview textbook (by the author of News Culture) that focuses on such cases as the reporting of 9/11, Iraq, and Katrina. Allan also has a chapter about on-line news in Mark J. Lacy and Peter Wilkin, eds. (2005), Global Politics in the Information Age (Manchester:  Manchester University Press).  There is an interesting theoretical chapter at the beginning of Michael Keren (2006) Blogosphere:  The New Political Arena (Lanham, MD:  Lexington Books), about emancipation and narcissism.  After that the chapters are mostly descriptions of various blogs – an American soldier, an Israeli mother, Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan, who were early blogging celebrities.  They are bit disappointing, because the definition of ‘politics’ here is a rather narrow one:  Keren evaluates their writing about recognised political issues.