Why We Blog

“Why We Blog” is a report on a study conducted by Nardi, Shiano, Gumbrecht and Shwartz which investigates the reasons why people blog. Surprisingly, they were able to find many bloggers with varied motives for blogging around the Stanford University area. The researchers organized their findings into 5 reasons why people blog. These areas include documenting everyday life, making comments and opinions, expressing personal emotions, writing ideas, and keeping up with an online community. Each one of these 5 reasons was thoroughly explained, with several examples. They found that nearly all the bloggers had personally-set limits to what material they would share on their blog. They also found that one advantage to blogging is the lack of one specific audience member, as opposed to emailing. By writing to no one in particular, blogs are only read by choice (as Lara, one of the bloggers described in the report says, ‘no one is forced to pay attention’).
Considering that this report was published in 2004, it is interesting that so many people were blogging in that one area. The bloggers seemed to have very clear understandings of their blogs’ purposes. I am surprised by this clarity because blogging was a relatively new concept at the time (I think?).
The 5 reasons to blog seem to be the same today as they were then. My all-time favorite blog, A Cup of Jo, written by Joanna Goddard, may be classified under many of these reasons. A lot of her posts do document her daily activities, especially big life-steps with her two sons and her marriage. But I don’t necessarily think she documents her life for her family/friends to “keep up”- I think a lot of it has to do with her nation-wide audience’s interest in her life. Her readers, including me, are fascinated by her sons beautiful faces and their upbringing in NYC. We are excited to see glimpses of her apartment décor, etc. And Joanna doesn’t mind sharing these details with her readers. I adore her and I think I would treat her like a celebrity if I saw her in real life. But when I read her blog, I think of her as a friend, someone normal who is trying to figure things out (she asks us for advice on her apartment wall color and where to take her boys on mother-son dates). So clearly, her blog does document her life. But her blog does other things too: like I said, she does have an online community between her blog and her readers (but also between her blog and other blogs). She shares (noncontroversial and respectful) opinions of things like NY legalizing gay marriage.
Overall, my main observation is that the 5 reasons to blog, as described in the report, are still very accurate. Every blog has a purpose and I think every reason to blog is a good reason :)