Scott Rosenberg

Bio

Scott Rosenberg is author of DREAMING IN CODE and SAY EVERYTHING: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters. Today he's working on a new project funded by the Knight News Challenge called MediaBugs. He cofounded Salon.com, where he served as managing editor for many years and conceived the Open Salon project. Before Salon, he wrote for the San Francisco Examiner for a decade as a theater and movie critic as well as "digital culture" columnist.

Abstract

Why do bloggers blog?

We see a pair of conflicting interpretations offered to explain bloggers' motivation. In the first, bloggers are combatants entering a brutal competition for page-views, attention and money, struggling to boost their numbers and achieve A-list rank, hoping their blogs will serve as short-cuts to celebrity and wealth. In the second, bloggers happily pursue a non-quantifiable goal of self-expressive fulfillment, seizing the opportunity to explore their ideas and expose their feelings on a public platform that costs them nothing except their own time.

I will review the (limited) research on this topic and try to explain why we have ended up with these contradictory pictures.