Bonnie Nardi has submitted this paper (16 pages) to Communications of the ACM.

Blogging has become enormously popular ... [and] much media attention has focused on blogging. [This] attention usually goes to "heavy-hitters."

In this paper, we report the results of an ethnographic investigation of blogging in a sample of "ordinary bloggers.”

We investigate blogging as a form of personal communication, with a specific interest in uncovering a range of motivations that individuals have for creating and maintaining blogs.

We discuss implications for improving current blogging tools and how such tools may affect the continuing evolution of the Internet and the ways it is used in everyday life.

There are two blogospheres!

This paper, by Bonnie A. Nardi, Diane J. Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht and Luke Swartz, is a concise report on why people blog, what keeps them blogging and why some people abandon their weblogs.

"Most bloggers are acutely aware of audience, even in flagrantly confessional blogs, calibrating what they will and will not reveal. Many bloggers explained that they have a kind of personal code of ethics thatdictates what goes into their blogs, such as never criticizing friends or expressing political opinions that are openly inflammatory. Not that bloggers eschew controversy—quite the opposite—but they typicallyexpress themselves in light of their audience."

The paper also is linked from the coursepages for "Computing and Cyberspace,"
along with other good essays and readings.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/classes/ics234cw04/

link opens a PDF. (via jeremy)