Webbloging: who, what and why

We live in a modern fast‐changing world and every sector of life has modified in order to better adapt to this situation. Social interaction is no exception. With the birth of the internet, hundreds of millions of people have begun to form online communities and to interact by means of this new media. One of the most popular form of online means of interaction is blogging. This paper seeks to shed some light upon this word that seems to be on everybody’s lips nowadays, “blog”, upon the characteristics of the ones who use it and the motives they have for doing so, the benefits they can obtain from this activity. Like many new phenomena, blogging is a controversial subject. While some believe it to be “the fifth estate”, others don’t think of it as being much more than a public journal, a place of pointless chit‐chat. Wherever the truth may lie, one can not ignore the rapid growth of the international bloggosphere and the massive numbers of people involved in it. That is why this paper is a plea for social scientists not to overlook or take lightly (as they have done so far) a growing phenomenon that has become a part of so many lives and which, by sheer accessibility, might ultimately write an important chapter in social interaction as we know it.

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