Jumping the Border in the Blogosphere?: A Cross-Cultural Comparative Study on the Motives of American, Russian, and German Bloggers for Writing and Commenting

Motives For Writing Blogs

Parallel to the rapid spread of blogs, a considerable body of research has been conducted on the authoring of blogs (Schmidt, 2007). Most of these studies focused on content analyses that examine user-initiated features and topics discussed in order to reveal bloggers’ motives and gratifications. For instance, Papacharissi (2004) conducted a content analysis of 260 registered public blogs hosted at blogger.com. From the results, she inferred possible gratifications that bloggers gained by publishing their blogs. She found that self-expression as well as social interaction seemed to be most important to English-language bloggers. The results further suggested that the posts were intended to be read by friends or family, thus fulfilling a need for social interaction. In a content analysis, Olcoń (2003) summarized five social functions of writing a blog: fulfillment of emotional needs, fulfillment of the need for social ties, sociability, pleasure, and self-expression.