Mathemagenic

One of the things I try to grasp in my conceptual struggles in weblog research is about relationships between blogging activities at different levels and co-dependencies between them.

A good starting point is comes from framework of blogging practices by Jan Schmidt (earlier comments on it). He distinguishes between: (1) blogging episodes that serve specific goals and (2) rules, relations and code that frame blogging episodes from one side and get redefined by them from another. Following this logic (in a heavily simplified way) one can talk about blogging practices as a whole and/or specific blogging episodes, taking into account the relations between those two.

Another distinction that could be made is between goals (why?), activities (what/how?) and effects (what happens as a result?) of blogging. Those are not always explicit (lots of writing happens without setting specific targets) and logical (goals, activities and effects are not necessarily correspond to each other).

Also it could make sense to talk about goals, activities and effects at both levels: those of a specific blogging episode and those "aggregated" over time into a personal blogging practice.

This is exactly where I have a problem, since once you interview people about their blogging experiences they do not make clear-cut distinction between all those things. They could tell you about their personal reasons to start blogging, give examples of specific blogging episodes, or talk about blogging effects discovered over time that eventually become part of explaining why and how a weblog is used in a particular way.

I thought of using Jan't framework, but it seems to exclude the level of personal blogging practices (from what I get his blogging practices are social constructs). So far I tend to us general category weblog uses, but this doesn't make my life easier, since this one needs definition as well (I some hopes for more clarity to come from Uses of blogs, but although it's a great collection I couldn't find any explicit definitions so far).