ABSTRACT
Internet enthusiasts can all agree that we are facing a fundamental shift in how information technologies support content creation and distribution over the World Wide Web (Anderson, 2006; O’Reilly, 2005; Scoble, 2007). Though the early Web was conceived of as a read-write platform (BBC, 2005), its openness to amateur content contributions was limited to those individuals who knew computer programming languages. The Web’s interactive shift was facilitated in the 1960s with the free software movement and the 1990s with the open source revolution (O’Reilly, 1999). These shifts now form the foundation for the growth of blogging software, which diffused in the latter 1990s through such tools as Blogger, Wordpress, and Movable Type. Through using blogging tools, the non-technophile citizen can now post content to the Web through an automated point and click interface as opposed to programming in computer code (Leadbeater & Miller, 2004; Lenhard, Fallows, & Horrigan, 2004).
