Resumen
This article reports that blogging is sometimes viewed as a new, grassroots form of journalism and a way to shape democracy outside the mass media and conventional party politics. Blog sites devoted to politics and punditry, as well as to sharing technical developments, receive thousands of hits a day. But the vast majority of blogs are written by ordinary people for much smaller audiences. This article reports the results of an ethnographic investigation of blogging in a sample of ordinary bloggers. Researchers investigated blogging as a form of personal communication and expression, with a specific interest in uncovering the range of motivations driving individuals to create and maintain blogs. Blogs combine the immediacy of up-to-the-minute posts, latest first, with a strong sense of the author's personality, passions and point of view. They found tremendous diversity in blog content, even in their limited sample. On the serious side, a graduate student in genetics, posted commentaries on science and health, covering such topics as AIDS, heart disease, science education and health care policy.