First picked up via MSM article: Blogging meets literary analysis: why people read blogs By John Timmer | Published: April 09, 2008 - 10:20PM CT The rise of blogging clearly represents a significant social phenomenon, but studying it poses a challenge in part because defining a blog is not a simple thing. There have been a number of attempts to do so at the technical level, where the presence of material organized by time stamp or the existence of RSS feeds have been suggested as defining features. A group at the University of California-Irvine, however, decided to approach the question from the perspective of human-computer interactions, where the humans involved were blog readers. Mixing in a dose of literary theory provided some interesting insights into how readers view and define blogs. < - > MSM article continues: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080409-blogging-meets-literary-theory -in-new-analysis.html The study's authors kindly provided Ars with a copy. It was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's CHI Conference, and is available through their website. The ACM link (reg' reqd) http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1357054.1357228