** My Intellectual Flakes **

Nardi et al. (2004) maintained that blogging is a social activity in many dimensions. Some started blogging as a response to a direct social request. Readership is the major drive for continuous and sustained blogging. Further some bloggers change the content of blogs in accordance with audience’s feedback and expectations. In this way, audience is not only the answer to why people blog, but also influence what people blog about.

They also summarized the motives for blogging as:

1) update others on activities and whereabouts
2) express opinions to influence others
3) seek others’ opinions and feedback
4) think by writing
5) release emotional tension

Some of their findings are quite similar to mine. And the paper prompted me to rethink the individual and social dimensions of blogging. The individual and social dimensions of blogging can be illustrated as the following:

In this way, any individual-oriented motive for blogging is intertwined with a social motive. It might be very interesting to explore into the interplay of these two dimensions.

Nardi, B. A., Schiano, D. J., & Gumbrecht, M. (2004). Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary? Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, 222-231.