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Aims to describe systematically the characteristics of weblogs (blogs) – frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence and which are the latest genre of internet communication to attain widespread popularity.

This paper presents the results of a quantitative content analysis of 203 randomly selected blogs, comparing the empirically observable features of the corpus with popular claims about the nature of blogs, and finding them to differ in a number of respects.

Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented towards external events, and underestimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self‐expression.

Based on the profile generated by the empirical analysis, considers the likely antecedents of the blog genre, situates it with respect to the dominant forms of digital communication on the internet today, and suggests possible developments of the use of blogs over time in response to changes in user behavior, technology, and the broader ecology of internet genres.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of blogging (writing online weblogs) in facilitating healing following sexual assault.

To explore how blog writing may facilitate healing and recovery, 30 blog posts written by survivors of sexual assault were analysed using thematic analysis.

The analysis revealed three themes: the aftermath of abuse, the need for support and helping others. In accordance with past research, bloggers frequently did not receive the supportive reaction to a face-to-face disclosure that they desired. Instead, blogging provided a safe environment in which victims could deal with the ongoing challenge of coping with, and recovering from the abuse. Moreover, blogging enabled victims to use their negative experience to educate and support others going through a similar experience, therefore allowing the bloggers to achieve some positive growth.

The results suggest that blogging and reading blogs may be beneficial to victims of sexual assault. Therefore, the findings support the recommendation of blogging by professionals working with victims of sexual assault.

The study presents the first analysis of blogs written by victims of sexual assault to facilitate their healing.

This article aims to explore construction, production and distribution of environmental information in social media. Specifically, the focus is on people's accounts in social media of their everyday life practices aimed at leading what are considered environmentally friendly lives. The article seeks to establish how through the reproduction of alignments of certain everyday and domestic practices with environmental destruction and protection situated information on the environment is constructed and made available.

This study is based on a qualitative, interpretative analysis of content, materiality and form of blogs and of their enmeshed social media applications, dedicated specifically to aspects of environmentally friendly everyday life. The blogs were selected from an interlinked set of 60 Swedish language environment blogs.

Formal, topical and social arrangements give priority to certain material conditions and practices that then underpin a set of dominant versions of a greener life, while others remain submerged. The routinised alignment of certain practices with the environment is indispensable for environmental information to work. However, breaking with routines and re‐arranging practices is what makes them possible in the first place. De‐routinisation and the culturally non‐habitual character make for the informational value of material practices and of practices of engagement.

The study contributes to the understanding of what makes environmental information meaningful in everyday life. This has potential implications for policy making and information campaigns in the area.

Environmental issues are an underrepresented area of research in LIS. This article contributes to the development of this research area in the field. Furthermore, uniting a practice approach with a theoretical interest in everyday life politics is a novel addition to studies of social engagement in online environments.

This commentary is a reflective discussion of how to use simple social media tools in college-level writing courses, and contains research elements such as effective examples of what is attainable and possible when incorporating blogs (e.g., Posterous) and Twitter in the college classroom. In order to do this, it uses reflective writing with a focus on failures/successes in past courses, and also incorporates students' own comments on blogging and Twitter. The chapter's findings include the following: The overall ease of use and relative simplicity of certain social media tools make for low barriers of entry for a majority of students. The mobile accessibility of these online communicative technologies should also be of specific appeal. These characteristics should encourage student participation in ways that content management systems like Blackboard do not. The convenience of and allowance for quick and easy sharing of information via blogging and microblogging can also mean that each is often quicker than email for contacting someone. What makes both better than Blackboard concerns how they, when taken together, sustain class discussion, keeping it alive, present, and continuous. If proper affordances are made in terms of framing and timing, social media can make for successful additions to college-level courses. Simple tools allow and encourage students to document and reflect on their own learning in ways that are meaningful and unique as they are.

The purpose of this paper is the presentation of a new method for blog quality assessment. The method uses the temporal sequence of link creation events between blogs as an implicit source for the collective tacit knowledge of blog authors about blog quality.

The blog data are processed by the novel method for the assessment of blog quality. The results are compared to Google Page Rank with respect to the Gold Standard, the BlogRazzi Bookmark Rank.

The method is similar or better than Google Page Rank with respect to the chosen Gold Standard.

The major contribution of this paper is the introduction of a novel method for blog quality assessment. Even though its superiority to other and more established methods cannot be proven in the context of this limited study, it enriches the toolset available for blog quality assessment and may become important for a deeper understanding of organizational learning.

Chief executives (CEOs) have turned to blogging. This research asks: do CEO blogs attract commenters leading to genuine discussion and community building?

The 30 most popular CEO blogs are analysed, community structure is graphically represented using social network analysis, measuring cohesion using connectedness. A review of content assesses whether richness and type of media affect community building.

By modelling a CEO blog as an affiliation network the structure is exposed. Community cohesiveness is assessed using a measure of connectedness. The connectedness ranking differs from the original Technorati Rank (TR) although the top blog in both is the same. Community building relates more to external reputation, writing style or topicality than to the type of media used.

CEO bloggers must engage commenters to build community. TR and connectedness scores measure different things but both affect community building. CEO blogs with high community scores post regularly, attract many comments and have an active core membership that bind the community. Top scoring CEO blogs build community and stimulate genuine discussion. Mid ranking blogs have little cross-post commenting and a fragmented network. Others attract few comments with low connectedness. “Wilderness” blogs may have no commenters. This suggests inefficient use of valuable CEO time. Because CEO credibility affects CEO blog success, a low-ranking blog depreciates CEO's reputation indicating little social capital.

There is little research into CEO blogging, this research contributes to the understanding of CEO blogging and community building.

The purpose of this research is to identify and describe the impact of comment spam in library blogs. Three research questions guided the study: current level of commenting in library blogs; librarians' perception of comment spam; and techniques used to address the comment spam problem.

A quantitative approach is used to investigate research questions. Informal interviews were conducted with four academic and three public libraries with active blogs to develop a better understanding of the problem and then to develop an appropriate data collection instrument. Based on the feedback received from these blog administrators, a survey questionnaire was developed and then distributed online via direct e‐mailing and mailing lists. A total of 108 responses were received.

Regardless of the library type with which blogs were affiliated with and the size of the community they served, user participation in library blogs was very limited in terms of comments left. Over 80 percent of libraries reported receiving five or fewer comments in a given week. Comment spam was not perceived to be a major problem by blog administrators. Detection‐based techniques were the most commonly used approaches to combat comment spam in library blogs.

The research focuses on the comment spam problem in blogs affiliated with libraries where the library is responsible for content published on the blog. The comment spam problem is investigated from the library blog administrator's perspective.

Results of this study provide empirical evidence regarding level of commenting and the impact of comment spam in library blogs. The results and findings of the study can offer guidance to libraries that are reconsidering whether to allow commenting in their blogs and to those that are planning to establish a blog to reach out to their users, while keeping this online environment engaging and interactive.

The study provides empirical evidence that level of commenting is very limited, comment spam is not regarded as an important problem, and it does not interfere with the communication process in library blogs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how corporate executives of companies are using blogging as a new communications channel.

The paper presents an overview of the blogging phenomenon, placing it in context of the larger growth of Web 2.0 and user‐generated content. The paper provides the reader with a primer on blogs and how they can be used effectively by executives, as well as looking at the importance of monitoring the blogosphere for what is being said by and about a company.

Over 50 corporate CEOs were found who are presently engaged in blogging. The research also identifies companies where employees have been fired for blogging and presents best practices in blogging and blog policies.

The principal limitation of the research is that as blogging is a rapidly growing and evolving area, the present results on executive blogging are accurate only for the moment. The implications of this research are that it provides the foundation for surveying not only the status of blogging by managers but also an agenda for blogging research, which might examine blogging behaviours, develop blog metrics and look toward the return on investment of blogging.

The paper reveals the benefits of managerial blogging for both the company and the individual. It also examines issues concerned with human resources, financial disclosure and policy development that have arisen because of the rise of blogging within companies.

The paper represents a timely review of a rapidly evolving social network and its associated communications technology, providing both management practitioners and academicians with insights into managing in a new age.

To describe new features and functionality of blogging and share a range of applications in the library environment.

Demonstrates the range of applications and suggests that this is a new information medium that is likely to have a keen presence for a long while as more users engage in the related activities and depend on Blogs and RSS for their sources of information.

Implementations in ways librarians never expected are now becoming common and the role of blogging and the challenges associated with tracking content on blogs remains of great interest. The wide spectrum of information sources and functionality of blogs proves to be ever‐changing.

Provides library community new ideas in how to implement blogs that will serve users in creative, positive and meaningful ways.

The paper aims to explore the performance of redundancy and novelty mining in the business blogosphere, which has not been studied before.

Novelty mining techniques are implemented to single out novel information out of a massive set of text documents. This paper adopted the mixed metric approach which combines symmetric and asymmetric metrics.

The results show that the novelty mining system can detect novel and redundant blogs in the dataset of business blogs with a very high accuracy.

This paper shows that novelty mining techniques can be applied to business blogs to help organizations filter redundant information, and that the cosine and mixed metrics approaches produce better results.