Navigating the blogosphere: Towards a genre-based typology of weblogs

Abstract

The personal weblog is a continuously evolving genre of online communication in which bloggers and readers create diverse social spaces for conversation and self-expression. This article addresses a conceptual gap in the literature, namely how to distinguish the personal weblog from other types of weblogs. The author develops a typological framework for classification of weblogs in three dimensions: content, directionality, and style, and uses the typological space to propose a working definition of the personal weblog and discuss it as a distinct sub-genre. Copyright © 2009, First Monday.