Dan's Metablog: Blogging and Narrative: But Dan, you had the power the whole time

But Dan, you had the power the whole time Wednesday, December 13 3:16 PM

I asked, and within the hour Prof. Sandeep Krishnamurthy sent me a copy of his 2002 essay "The multidimensionality of blog conversations: The virtual enactment of September 11." That's what I like about this field.

Why did I not do this when I was writing my thesis? I suppose I wasn't getting much sleep back then; I can't really remember.

The essay contains a fair bit of definition, and is often cited for its elegant blog taxonomy (here's a picture from another article). Even today — and there are many months of research behind this judgment call — most blog classification schema are far more arbitrary, basically whatever genres the blogger can think of off the top of her head.

In my thesis I call this the "recipe approach," because it's about listing features (squishy), while Krishnamurthy's system (like mine, but I don't have a drawing) is about defining/mapping boundaries (less squishy).

But whatever. The rest of the essay focuses on how community news blogs react to traumatic events: the example here is Metafilter's reaction to 9/11. Since it's so hard to track down a copy, here's an important (underlined in the original) nugget from the conclusion:

While the quantity and frequency of communication go up, the style of communication does not change too much. (12)

I've added an expanded cite to the discourse history. I don't see any influential theorists that far back in the timeline who aren't also prominent metabloggers; Krishnamurthy's essay might be the first academic one on blogging to attract much (scholarly) attention.

Comments (4)

Is there any chance of getting hold of a copy of Krishnamurthy's paper. I have been looking everywhere for it, someone, anyone please help

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