Linguistic properties and aspects of blogging within the context of Netspeak

Abstract: Within the context of Netspeak, and English as a global language, weblogs (blogs) are defined as frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence, are becoming an increasingly popular form of communication on the World Wide Web. The present paper introduces blogs as an asynchronous type of online communication that share features with asynchronous discussion forums. The paper presents the origin of blogs, the blogosphere – who blogs and about what - and most importantly, why people blog. The scope of blogs is argued to have expanded dramatically over the past decade, making blogging more of a multifaceted tool than a specific type of Internet platform. The paper outlines the basic linguistic features of blogs and gives an overview of basic blog types and their corresponding linguistic properties and aspects. The paper serves the purposes of characterizing the properties of the emergent blog genre, situating it with respect to the broader genre ecology of the Internet. The idea is to provide an empirical snapshot of the weblog in its present stage, as a historical record for purposes of comparison with future stages of evolution, and to contribute to a theoretical understanding of how technological changes trigger the formation of new genres, which in turn may affect the genre ecology of a larger domain such as the Internet.