I've been lurking on the list a while but have come forward because I am finding it difficult to do something which seemed at first relatively un-problematic - determining what counts as a personal home page. Wherever I draw the line there seem to be sites that fall just outside it that might fit. Is there a commonly-understood definition?
See "Genres and the Web: Is the personal home page the first uniquely digital genre?" by Andrew Dillon and Barbara Gushrowski. Available at www.ischool.utexas.edu/ ~adillon/publications/genres_web.pdf and also available as: Dillon, A., & Gushrowski, B. A. (2000). Genres and the Web: Is the Personal Home Page the First Uniquely Digital Genre? Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(2), 202-205. Also see "Personal Home Pages on the Web: A Review of Research" by Nicola Döring - available in JCMC at http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol7/issue3/doering.html You might also try this one: Bauman, M. L. (1999). The Evolution of Internet Genres. Computers and Composition, 16(2), 269-282. or this one: Yates, J., & Orlikowski, W. (1992). Genres of Organizational Communication: A Structurational Approach to Studying Communication and Media. Academy of Management Review, 17(2), 299-326. You might also check out week 4 of Susan Herring's syllabus for her Content Analysis for the Web course, available at: http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/web.syll.04.html If you slog through all of this you will have a pretty good grip on personal home pages and 'net genre theory in general... --elijah