I'm studying African American weblogs and online media for my dissertation; i did a technorati and bloglines search initially, but was really unsatisfied with the results because many of the African American blogs i read weren't included. I did a snowball sample, using informants (bloggers) and their blogrolls, said inspiration being derived by work that Susan Herring and some others have been doing a lot of work on blogs recently (cites below). That worked really well for me, but i should add that it worked well because i was looking for bloggers discussing a specific race-related incident. I did so because such incidents seem to crystallize discussions of identity, which of course in a blogging context is performed discursively and often reified in the comments. Basically, if you're looking for a performance of identity - which is what i'm getting when you use the word "genre" - you need to find content that encourages an articulation of that identity. Thousands of bloggers write about their cats, but cats are pretty much a race-neutral topic. Look for topics that incite comment, and you'll find your target population. Herring, S. C., Kouper, I., Scheidt, L. A., and Wright, E. (2004). Women and children last: The discursive construction of weblogs. In L. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/ Herring, S. C., Kouper, I., Paolillo, J. C., Scheidt, L. A., Tyworth, M., Welsch, P., Wright, E., and Yu, N. (2005). Conversations in the blogosphere: An analysis "from the bottom up." Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-38). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/blogconv.pdf Andre -- Andre Brock PhD Candidate - Library and Information Studies Project Athena Fellow POSSE Mentor - UIUC Posse 2 (217.333.4693) University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign