Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to evaluate how the characteristics of community are found in the blog medium and how these characteristics constitute a virtual community? Virtual communities, or online communities, are used for a variety of social and professional groups interacting via the Internet. It does not necessarily mean that there is a strong bond among the members, although Howard Rheingold, author of the book of the same name, mentions that virtual communities form "when people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships".[An email distribution list may have hundreds of members and the communication which takes place may be merely informational (questions and answers are posted), but members may remain relative strangers and the membership turnover rate could be high. This is in line with the liberal use of the term community.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER TWO: CREATING CONTEXT12

Blogs & The Blogosphere12

Blog History14

The Internet & Blogging16

Why?17

CHAPTER THREE: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY20

Theoretical Framework22

CHAPTER FOUR: LITERATURE REVIEW24

Community24

Virtual Community28

Blogs As Virtual Communities30

Chapter Five: Ethnographic Fieldwork36

Transfer techniques of ideas37

What is a blog?39

CHAPTER SIX: RESULTS41

Types of Blogs and dynamics42

Postmodern and generational characteristics related to blogging42

Other Cultural Factors44

Open doors of blogging44

Some Ethical Issues In Virtual Communities45

CHAPTER SEVERN: CONCLUSION48

REFERENCES50

BIBLIOGRAPHY54

Chapter One: Introduction

With the boom in blogging of the past few years, tools have emerged to aggregate, analyze and manage information from the thousands of weblogs being updated every day. Sites such as.bartleby.com and newsjunkie.info track which blogs are linking to which, and which links are being linked the most across all the blogs they track. Blog tools now come with built-in RSS feeds that allow readers to view blog posts how they want - stripped of all design, back to raw text, and aggregated with the latest posts from other blogs in a uniform newsreader format, creating in effect a personal daily newspaper of personal daily postings.

Collective blogs such as metafilter.com and tools such as del.icio.us allow readers to bypass personal idiosyncrasies and tap into the group-mind of the blogging community. The site flickr.com allows users to upload digital photos and share them with the world - and, more significantly, for readers to tag and recombine those photos in ways that neither the author nor anyone else can predict. A tool originally taken up by bloggers as a place to store photos for individual blogs has taken on a collective life of its own. “Tagging” is a term used to describe human indexing of material on the Web, which in theory makes content more intuitively found and shared. The idea behind tagging may be irresistibly simple, but its ramifications are enormous and complex. For more than a decade, the primary way to categorize and find information on the Internet was through the automated algorithms of search engines, a process at once laborious and highly imprecise. Tagging has quickly gained popularity because it allows human beings to bring intuitive organization to what otherwise would be largely anonymous entries in an endless sea of data. The practice brings a social context to such ...