Why We Blog

Blogging is sometimes viewed as a new, grassroots form of journalism and a way to shape democracy outside the mass media and conventional party politics. Blog sites devoted to politics and punditry, as well as to sharing technical developments (such as www.slashdot.org), receive thousands of hits a day. But the vast majority of blogs are written by ordinary people for much smaller audiences. Here, we report the results of an ethnographic investigation of blogging in a sample of ordinary bloggers. We investigated blogging as a form of personal communication and expression, with a specific interest in uncovering the range of motivations driving individuals to create and maintain blogs.