[Air-l] blogging, reading and responding

[Barry Wellman]

Re the "imagined audience" of bloggers, "reader response" research in
literature, etc. has dealt with this since pre-internet times. Worth
checking. (Sorry, I don't have any references. scholar.Google and ye shall
find.)

However, given that most blogs make audience feedback easy, there may well
be some differences with blogs. My hunch is that blog-audience response is
the usual reverse J-curve: a few people respond a lot. Hence bloggers
may be mistaken as to who their audiences are if they only pay attention
to their relatively few feedbackers.

Never did any research on this. Just my .02. YMMV.

 Barry
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  Barry Wellman         Professor of Sociology        NetLab Director
  wellman at chass.utoronto.ca  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman

  Centre for Urban & Community Studies          University of Toronto
  455 Spadina Avenue    Toronto Canada M5S 2G8    fax:+1-416-978-7162
	     To network is to live; to live is to network
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