Bloggers around the world produce material for local, national and international audiences, yet they are developing in ways that are distinct from the U.S. model. Through case studies of blogs written in English, Chinese, Arab, French, Russian, and Hebrew, this book explores the way blogging is being conceptualized in different cultural contexts. The authors move beyond the most highly trafficked sites to shed light on larger developments taking place online, calling into question assumptions that form the foundation of much of what we read on blogging and, by extension, on global amateur or do-it-yourself media. This book suggests a more nuanced approach to understanding how blogospheres serve communication needs, how they exist in relation to one another, where they exist apart as well as where they overlap, and how they interact with other forms of communication in the larger media landscape.
Dr Axel Bruns is an Associate Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (http://cci.edu.au/). He is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008) and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and a co-editor of A Companion to New Media Dynamics (2012, with John Hartley and Jean Burgess) and Uses of Blogs (2006, with Joanne Jacobs). Bruns is an expert on the impact of user-led content creation, or produsage, and his current work focusses on the study of user participation in social media spaces such as Twitter, especially in the context of acute events. His research blog is at http://snurb.info/, and he tweets at @snurb_dot_info. See http://mappingonlinepublics.net/ for more details on his current social media research.
