University of Abertay, Dundee

Digital Diaries, Why Do We Blog?

Project Description:

The aim of this piece of research is to design a blogging site which emphasises and reinforces motivational features that may explain whether gender-related factors influence the decision to maintain an online journal.

Diary-style blog sites have become, inarguably, incredibly popular since their launch in the late 1990s. This piece of research sets out to examine what drives people to create and maintain a blog, and further more, if there are any gender related factors in this decision � for example, drawing on the commonly held belief that women tend to keep diaries more than men, are women perhaps more likely to maintain a diary-style blog than men?

With the use of an online questionnaire tool, data will be collected from bloggers and used to both assess (from the surveyed sample) if there is indeed a difference in blogging habits between men and women, and to design a blog site that will reinforce the features deemed to be motivational by bloggers, features that may indeed explain whether gender-related factors influence the decision to maintain an online journal.