The post as an utterance: Analysis of themes, compositional forms and styles in blog genre studies

Abstract

The blogosphere’s heterogeneity has significantly increased in recent years. Thus, the blog-as-diary approach has shown its limitations. Viewing blogs as a genre is also misleading, as it confuses medium and genre. Considering that the studies of blog genres still need further theoretical and empirical investigations, we propose a method to assess blog posts, understood as utterances, the minimal unit of a blog. We then conduct an analysis of two large datasets from 100 Brazilian blogs. Three reviewers read and judged 5218 posts from 50 A-list blogs and 1527 posts from 50 non-A-list blogs, captured in a 30-day period. Posts’ compositional form, theme and style were cross-analyzed in and between datasets. Our findings lead to the conclusion that blogs in the A-list group tend to post more and stick to themes that attract audiences. Non-A-list blogs post less and focus on themes of interest to bloggers themselves, not necessarily hype topics.

Has Blog Reader–Focused Research Evolved?

“…Similarly, Kalaitzandonakes (2019) examined mom blogs' influence on moms' nutrition beliefs and habits. Primo et al (2013) evaluated kinds of blogs through an investigation of two large corpuses from Brazilian blogs. They found 16 blog genres with other subgenres.…”