Why Blog? Motivations for Blogging

Citation

Angus, E. (2010), "Why Blog? Motivations for Blogging", Online Information Review, Vol. 34 No. 6, pp. 989-990. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521011099504

The year 1999 saw an explosion of blogs appearing online, and this was thanks to the introduction of free, “easy‐to‐use build‐your‐own blog software such as Pitas and Blogger”. But as well as having the tools readily available to enable people to blog, people have different motivations for wanting to blog, which result in many different types of blogs, and it is these different motivations and resulting blogs which this book discusses.

Regardless of whether you blog yourself, this book gives a valuable insight into the minds of those who do. Considering there are 2.5 million of the UK and 3 million of the US population who blog, it is useful to have an insight into such a large population.

The main focus of the book is on consolidating the findings from three research projects which the author outlines, with the aim of answering the question of why people blog. The research focuses primarily on the British blogosphere, and on personal rather than corporate blogs, and utilises a mixture of questionnaire, content analysis and classification methodologies. The book covers: the blog as a diary, blogging as therapy, blogging for friends and blogging for strangers, privacy issues, blogging as a form of journalism or publishing, blogging as political activism, blogging for profit, and whether women and men (and Americans and British) differ in their reasons for blogging.

Particularly interesting is the discussion on the differences between male and female bloggers. Overall, female bloggers tend to write more diary‐like blogs, whereas males write more opinion‐focussed blogs. Yet while there are more women online overall, women do not dominate the blogosphere, apart from in the area of sex confessional blogs. The area of sex confessional blogs is also tied in with another interesting section of the book which looks at blooks (books that are based on the contents from a blog), and this section further ties in with that of blogging for profit. As is the case with most investigations into motivations, things are not always clear‐cut, and motivations for doing a particular activity can be for a mixture of reasons which often blur and feed into each other. Another key point which Pedersen points out is that motivations can change over time as a person's circumstances change. The key finding, however, is that blogging does not work when someone is forced to blog (perhaps in a work situation); while people may be motivated to blog for a number of different reasons, the key motivator is their enthusiasm and the satisfaction they gain from doing it.

Regardless of your academic background, if you are interested in finding out more both about the blogosphere as a whole and people's motivations for blogging and the types of blogs which exist, this book is definitely worth a read. It is well structured, well written, and extremely informative.