" I ' m Blogging This ” A Closer Look at Why People Blog

Introduction Weblogs, or blogs, are online journals. While definitions vary, we define blogs as a series of archived Internet posts typically characterized by brief texts entered in reverse chronological order and generally containing hypertext links to other sites recommended by the author. Some blogs utilize photos and other media. Blogs combine the immediacy of up-to-the-minute posts, latest first, with a strong sense of the author's personality, expertise, and point of view. Unlike most mainstream journalism in which efforts at objectivity influence presentation, blogs are unabashedly partisan, infused with authors' assessments, assumptions, and attitudes. Blogging has become enormously popular, with an estimated 500,000 sites currently in existence and predicted exponential growth [11].