Abstract:
'Within the last decade, blogs have become an important
element of popular culture, mass media, and the daily lives
of countless Internet users. Despite the medium’s
interactive nature, most research on blogs focuses on either
the blog itself or the blogger, rarely if at all focusing on the
reader’s impact. In order to gain a better understanding of
the social practice of blogging, we must take into account
the role, contributions, and significance of the reader. This
paper presents the findings of a qualitative study of blog
readers, including common blog reading practices, some of
the dimensions along which reading practices vary,
relationships between identity presentation and perception,
the interpretation of temporality, and the ways in which
readers feel that they are a part of the blogs they read. It
also describes similarities to, and discrepancies with,
previous work, and suggests a number of directions'
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ebaumer/chi1132-baumer.pdf
