Congratulations, a very informing and concise paper!
It's nice to see someone bring Habermas into the weblog-discourse - especially for those thinking along the lines of Ito's "emergent democracy", Habermas' ideas about the public sphere and the ideal speech situation is mandatory reading!
Of course, some ideas and arguments you've touched almost cry for further elaboration.. :)

For example, it would be interesting to look the connections of and differences between Weblog-as-Text, Weblog-as-software/code, and individual Agents (including the roles of author, commenter, reader/lurker). Analytically, those three "units of analysis" should be separated to identify the distinct contributions or limitations of each for the ideal speech situation.

I'll crosspost this to my blog and make your text mandatory reading for a course I'm giving this semester for a class of sociologists... so there might be some additional discourse.. :-)

Ik heb een kopie van je paper opgeslagen, en ga die met belangstelling lezen. Mooi werk!
De directe aanleiding voor mijn eigen weblog was een artikel dat ik las: 'Weblogs als marketinginstrument'. Dat moet ik eens uitzoeken, dacht ik...

Hi Elmine,

I'm currently doing a Masters in Educational Technology and English Language Teaching at Manchester University by distance. We'll soon be looking at the potential of weblogs in language education, and I found a link to your article 'Understanding Weblogs' on the British Council website. I've only read the abstract so far and your work looks fascinating, relevant and useful. So I've posted links to your article and your weblog on my own weblog, because I thought my coursemates would find it interesting and useful. Is this acceptable on my part :-?. Please let me know if it isn't.

With best wishes,

Tot ziens!

Martin Barge.

Dear Elmine,

many thanks for giving me permission to put links to your article and blog on my blog. A couple of my on-line classmates have already expressed their thanks for the links, so I think you're getting some readership.

I've just finished reading your thesis and found it truly fascinating. It's such a good, detailed analysis of the blog as a genre of communication and I find the distinctions you make between webpages, forums and blogs very illuminating. You raise many issues concerning the nature of communicative acts and CMC and there's plenty of food for thought. I especially like the way you differentiate the 'chat' style and 'professional' style of blogging. The analogy with Speaker's Corner is excellent and very true. I find the idea of virtual passers-by very appealing. You also make some very thought-provoking points about the thruthfulness or otherwise of information in blogs - this is interesting, because it touches on all sorts of issues relating to the validity of e-based information, whether in blogs, forums or webpages. Last year I did a project on the use of the www for academic research and this raised many issues concerning the academic authority and validity of much on-line material.

I'm also very interested in the social construction of knowledge and, as you say, blogs surely have an important role to play here, in the sharing of knowledge, the exchange of ideas and the negotiation of meaning. Clearly, then, they can play a role in language learning.

The issue of synchronicity is fascinating, isn't it, because it raises all sorts of questions about the similarities and differences between CMC and more traditional forms of information exchange, such as letters, the phone and face-to-face. How we try to capture/convey the immediacy of face-to-face communication by using emoticons or very informal chat language, yet we are using the written medium rather than the spoken. It's interesting how CMC can act as a channel for a whole range of speech activity, from very informal to highly formal discourse.

I'm sorry if this is a rather long message if you're moving on to other things, but I wanted to give you some feedback.

So thank you very much again Elmine, and good luck with your job hunting ;-) !!

Best wishes,

Martin Barge.

Thanks everyone for your kind reactions. If you ever refer to my paper in your own work, please let me know!