Why We Blog...

    From April to June of 2003, four students took an in-depth look at why people blog by conducting interviews and observing twenty-three people from the Stanford University area. Their objective was to identify motivations for blogging and see what content they were posting. 

    In their research, they discovered five motivations for blogging. Those five include - “blogs to ‘document’ my life meaning they blogged to record life events and activities they were involved in. Maybe they have moved away from their friends and family and want them to stay in touch or to keep people update on sicknesses and treatments. This text gave the example of Don, who kept people up to date with his wife’s illness via blogs. For some people, it’s easier to each a mass amount of people through blogs instead of emails. The second conclusion they made was “blogs as commentary” meaning bloggers found their voices and were able to express their ideas and opinions freely on a blog. It can be an outlet for people to say what they want. Thirdly, “blogs as catharsis” which is a lot like number two. They found people were using blogs as an outlet for their feelings, thoughts, and emotions. Lara, a interviewee stated that blogs were a way she could work out her own issues. Blogs allow people to have a audience to speak too maybe without them knowing a single person in that audience. The fourth thing they found was that blogs serve as a muse - meaning people were able to thinking because they were writing. This helps people process what is going on in their world - they are just speaking things, they are processing it through writing which in turn allows for an audience to shape the writing and for reuse of posts. The last one of the five things they learned from their research was that blogs are motivated as community forums. People want to hear the opinions of people in their communities as well as the creative abilities of their communities members. 

   What they found was that blogs contents are very diverse and is a versatile medium. It’s a growing form of communication and is a major use on the internet.