2.1. Blogs
Blogs are customizable online web spaces that allow users to post content, which is displayed in reverse chronological order. Depending on the blogging software or service used, entries may include video and other rich media. Visitors to an individual’s personal blog can typically post comments to specific entries and can also elect to be automatically notified whenever a new entry has been posted by subscribing to a blog’s feed. Blogs are personal journals or reversed chronological commentaries written by individuals and made publicly accessible on the web. To many people, blogs are not much different from regular websites; however, they have distinctive technological features that differentiate them from other forms of computer mediated communication. These features include: (i) easy-to-use content management system; (ii) archive-oriented structure; (iii) latest-information-first order; (iv) links to other blogs; and (v) ease of responding to previous blog postings (Huffaker, D. A., & Calvert, S. L, 2005). However, with the evolution of blogging technology, and the fast expansion of the blogosphere, the form, content and functions of blogs have expanded tremendously. These weblogs are often perceived as low threshold tools to publish online, empowering individual expression in public. Although a weblog is a personal writing space, its public nature suggests a need to communicate, (Efimova, L., & Hendrick, S. 2005) and invites feedback. Weblogs can be positioned as their own genre, situated on an intermediate point between standard web pages and asynchronous computer mediated communication along dimensions of frequency of update, symmetry of communicative exchange and multimodality (Herring, S. C. 2007). Because of the flexible and interconnected nature of blogs, people can use blogs for various purposes including: keeping personal diary (Bortree, D. S. 2005), interacting with other bloggers building a virtual community; and disseminating messages to a mass audience (Lawson-Borders, G., & Kirk, R. 2005).
Even though the majority of blogs contain personal thoughts or feelings of authors that are not intended for mass dissemination, blogs exist in a public arena, the Internet, and messages posted in blogs are open to anyone with an Internet connection (Gurak, L. J., Antonijevic, S., Johnson, L., Ratliff, C., & Reyman, J. 2004). More and more bloggers are recognizing this mass communication potential of blogs and use blogs to publish their opinions on public issues and to disseminate them to a mass audience (Trammell, K. D., & Keshelashvili, A. 2005). Bloggers desire connection with their audience, want to insert themselves into known, sometimes unknown social spaces, to update, inform or advise, to greet or grumble, to pontificate, confess, create and to think (Nardi, B. A., Schiano, D. J., Gumbrecht, M., & Swartz, L. 2004). Blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. Discussions in the Blogosphere have been used by the media as a gauge of public opinion on various issues. The active Blogosphere can be defined as - The ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation (Barsky, E. 2006). Bloggers are not a homogeneous group. There are personal, professional and corporate bloggers, all having differing goals and covering a myriad range of topics, using different techniques to drive traffic to their blogs, different publishing tools on their blog and distinct metrics for measuring success. Social exchange via Blog fosters enterprise reputation (Wu, C. H., Kao, S. C., & Lin, H. H. 2013).