Alexander Halavais, in his paper, Tracking Ideas in the Blogosphere, uses a very interesting term to refer to what is happening in the blogosphere, “discourse at the boundary between conversation and publication.” His study describes a method for identifying emergent themes within blogs and tracking them over linkage networks.
His study looks at word frequency over time by academic bloggers. He provides a nice graphic of the nodes and connectors between blogs. However, the aspect of this paper that had the greatest influence on me was his almost throw away phrase in the abstract, “discourse at the boundary between conversation and publication.”
I think this represents some of the tension and power of blogs. They are public conversation, more lively and personal than normal publication, and more permanent and accessible than normal conversation. They create a global conversation through personal publication. Each participant has their platform to engage in this dialog on their own blog and in the comment fields of others.
Hello Bill
Just a link in relation to Zillman's web browsers:
http://virtualprivatelibrary.blogspot.com/Online%20Research%20Browsers.pdf
Posted by: Jozef Imrich | October 13, 2004 at 10:42 PM