On 11/03/2008, David Brake <d.r.brake@lse.ac.uk> wrote:
On 7 Mar 2008, at 15:25, Charles Ess wrote:
bloggers by definition want their material to be read
Coming in on this one a bit late and perhaps I am making too much of what was probably just a passing comment, but I have to take issue with this. It is true that (non-friend/password protected) bloggers are making their material available to be read. But in my own interviews (with 22 personal webloggers) their imagined and desired relationships with readers varied widely and a few of them said they had no intention to be read by anyone else when they started.
From my own point of view, I didn't start blogging to have an audience. Granted, I did do it through work, so I hoped that my students *might* read it; but I didn't put any compulsion on them *to* read it. I'd certainly never imagined that I'd have as many readers as I do from as wide a range of places ...
I wonder if many personal bloggers start with a (very) limited audience initially, and may be somewhat uncomfortable to discover they're read by a wider audience. -- Emma Duke-Williams: School of Computing/ Faculty eLearning Co-ordinator. Blog: http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/