ABSTRACT
The rapid emergence of Internet-based personal Weblogs reflects specific technological innovations and new online practices with broad affinity for the self as dialogical. This chapter employs qualitative analyses of the structural components and selected postings from a spectrum of 20 English-language blogs. It extends Vincent W. Hevern’s earlier analysis and addresses H. J. M. Hermans’s speculation by examining a newly emergent net environment, the personal Weblog. Weblogs display multiple and shifting positionings in the form of ongoing, personally meaningful, and hypertextually threaded themes. Weblogs display an interest in both visual display and presentation quality. Each Weblog has a distinctive look and feel; they often have coordinated graphical, typographical, and formatting schemes deployed in a consistent fashion. Unlike personal homepages, the publishing of a Weblog is an activity profoundly expressive of an author’s experience of time, a fundamental condition for Hermans’s model of moving positions in the dialogical self.
