Building social identity through blogging

The emergence of the internet has given opportunities for new virtual spaces to be developed and new communication tools to facilitate virtual interactions. These spaces and tools have enabled the emergence of online communities. Not only is the number of virtual communities increasing rapidly, but there is also an increase in the variety of community forms. One prominent new type is the blogging community. Blogs emerged around the late 1990s and are now a recent and important web-based form of communication, which has gained widespread popularity and mainstream use (Schiano et al., 2004). Recent estimates from blogcensus. net (NITLE Blog Census, 2006) place the number of blog sites at over 2.8 million. Blogs are frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence (Herring et al., 2005). They have been highlighted extensively in the popular media and have entered political campaigns, news organizations, businesses, and classrooms. Despite the fact that their popularity has grown exponentially, there is limited knowledge about how individual members identify themselves with such communities.