[Air-l] definition of personal home pages

[David Brake]

Thank you Elijah for some useful references on personal home pages and
genre. However, I am still not really the wiser about whether there is an
accepted definition of what makes a page a home page and what excludes it
from being one.

> See "Genres and the Web: Is the personal home page the first uniquely
> digital genre?" by Andrew Dillon and Barbara Gushrowski.

Well they defined home pages as, "belonging to a named individual who was
not advertising or selling a business or service and whose information
content primarily related to him/herself. Thus we ruled out standardized
personal pages from companies and universities listing their staff and
faculty but included pages of such people if their personal homepages were
distinct from the organizations' standard listings." It's a plausible
definition but (as I noted in my blog posting) is that definition really
the accepted one? Certainly Nicola Doring's is different, for example -
she says commercial pages *are* excluded (as does Dominick, J. (1999) "Who
Do You Think You Are? Personal Home Pages and Self-Presentation on the
World Wide Web", Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 76 pp.
646-658, who she cites). None of them says why this should be the case.

It seems to me that both sets of authors are taking a 'common sense'
definition of what a personal home page is but it is telling that they
actually end up with differing definitions. I might have to decide to make
my own definition or choose one or the other of the definitions provided
so far but I would prefer if the choice didn't appear arbitrary or
personal!
-- 
David Brake, PhD researcher in Media and Communications, London School of
Economics & Political Science
<http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm>
Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page) and http://blog.org/ (weblog)
Author of Dealing With E-Mail - <http://davidbrake.org/dealingwithemail/>
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