Bonnie Nardi has submitted this paper (16 pages) to Communications of the ACM.

Blogging has become enormously popular ... [and] much media attention has focused on blogging. [This] attention usually goes to "heavy-hitters."

In this paper, we report the results of an ethnographic investigation of blogging in a sample of "ordinary bloggers.”

We investigate blogging as a form of personal communication, with a specific interest in uncovering a range of motivations that individuals have for creating and maintaining blogs.

We discuss implications for improving current blogging tools and how such tools may affect the continuing evolution of the Internet and the ways it is used in everyday life.

There are two blogospheres!

A Closer Look at Why People Blog