The Blogosphere as œUvre: Individual and Collective Influences on Bloggers

Blogging has often been described as writing an online diary but, nowadays, it is more diverse and a considerable amount of blogs forms a common interconnected resource – the blogosphere – with comprehensive societal impact. While various studies have inquired social-psychological influences on the intention to contribute to an individual blog, the perceptions related to creating such a common valuable good have not yet been focussed. Therefore, we introduce a new construct – the œuvre of blogging – to better account for the notion of the blogosphere as a collective outcome. Furthermore, we propose a research model to inquire the influence of individual and collective beliefs on the œuvre in comparison to short-term blogging activity. We conducted an online survey with 509 international distributed bloggers to test our model. The results of our study provide support for the importance of an œuvre construct to explain influences on bloggers and blogging.