From a simple list of links annotated and maintained by a small blog community of Internet groupies to elaborated content today, blogs have exploded into a rich gamut of subgenres. Most approaches that pioneered internet communication research are in fact non-empirical and non-linguistic. Two major blog types appear to have emerged, personal blogs and thematic blogs, with their corresponding already-established subgenres of filter blogs, k-logs, and corporate blogs as well as other emerging hybrid subgenres such as that of expat blogs. This chapter explores the language of high-impact blogs, testing a new methodology to establish blog genealogy in the context of online genre hybridity. Language data are collected using a major blog searching engine (Technorati) that currently indexes more than a million blogs. Individual language scores, which are used to calculate DICTION’s sub variables, are concatenated to outline the overall tone and theme of the blog posts that can be classified accordingly. The findings are correlated with existing blog classifications to propose a Diction-based methodology for genre analysis.
Interchanging Aesthetic and Technical: The Digital Narratives in Higher Educational Pedagogies
