What is your personal blogging style by Dr Shock MD PhD is a refreshing take on a contentious issue. He has brought to the notice of the science bloggers of actual hard research which takes a look at blogging styles. If you are interested in reading about the original paper or want a link to it, I suggest you scamper over to his page now and check out his article for yourself.
As far as I am concerned, this research has one MAJOR flaw: it collected the bloggers from MySpace. Now that is a bunch of selection bias right there. It is a very well known fact that MySpace is not really the hos spot for bloggers right now. In fgact, it has been dying very rapidly over the last 3-4 years as Facebook rises to ascendancy. Now, because FB doesn’t really have a blogging platform (not one which is robust and well-maintained, anyways), it has never really been a player in this field. The major competitors have been WordPress (.com AND .org) and Blogger by Google. If the researchers had to take blogs up for study, they could have done it in a much more controlled and orderly fashion if they had done any of the following:
- Chosen active bloggers using blogrings or blogrolls of nucleus bloggers
- If they had to take bloggers from one particular setting using wordpress.com tags or blogger categories would have been a great idea
- Using independent bloggers as the starting point around which to crystallize the search
MySpace definitely is not the place to search for bloggers. Anyways. Read Dr. Shock’s take on it in the link above.
Do you still have a MySpace account?
Scepticemia 
The only people I know on MySpace are musicians at this point, and most of them are finding other platforms to showcase their music.
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I agree. I once had a MySpace account but if you repeat that, I am going to kill you! 😡
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I dropped MySpace a few days after I started trying it out. It was just too inane for me. Livejournal was much better, but that’s becoming more and more obsolete now.
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Never tried my hands with LJ. But I think LJ’s merging with wp.com. IMHO, wp.com are the blogging gods!
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Thanks for the link to the study, Dr. Skeptic. Do you think Dr. Shock is differentiating between “personal blogging” and “business blogging” or other types of blogging? Of the four types of personal blogs he listed, my blog probably fits best in his “Connected” category, but it’s not a great fit. I do want to connect and communicate with others, and I’m trying to create a sense of community on my blog, but I don’t want it to get all touchy-feely. My blog is part of my business, and my business is helping people (and other businesses) share their stories. So, yes, I am trying to build connections, but I like to think there’s a sense of professionalism on my blog that may not be part of a typical MySpace, “Connected” blog. But if “personal blogging” is the larger category, maybe that disqualifies me already!
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To be honest, I am severely skeptical about the study since the studied blogs were culled from MySpace. It is in no way a representative sample. I linked to this study because I found the research question and methodology interesting, albeit with a significant selection bias involved.
I would suggest not worrying about such ephemeral epithets too much, and just not lose one’s own personal voice!
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What about your own blog—do you consider it a “personal” blog, or something else?Does it fit into any of the categories described in the article?
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Well, I am not sure, but I think it would best fit into the connected and personal genres, but I am pretty skeptical about the classification!
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Thank goodness I never had Myspace… I don’t even know anyone who uses it anymore, so I can’t see how it would be a valid place to base a study of blogs on either.
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Wow! This could be one particular of the most helpful blogs We’ve ever arrive across on this subject. Actually Magnificent. I’m also a specialist in this topic therefore I can understand your effort.
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