This paper presents results from an ethnographic study with readers of political blogs. It builds on our previous research on blog readers in two ways. First, it examines blog reading in a specific context, i.e., political blogs, rather than blog reading in general. Second, it involves both readers and bloggers as study participants in order to understand the interactions between the two. For now, here’s the abstract:

A significant amount of research has focused on blogs, bloggers, and blogging. However, relatively little work has examined blog readers, their interactions with bloggers, or their impact on blogging. This paper presents a qualitative study focusing specifically on readers of political blogs to develop a better understanding of readers’ interactions with blogs and bloggers. This is the first such study to examine the same blogging activity from both readers’ and bloggers’ perspectives. Readers’ significance and contributions to blogs are examined through a number of themes, including: community membership and participation; the relationship between political ideology, reading habits, and political participation; and differences and similarities between mainstream media (MSM) and blogs. Based on these analyses, this paper argues that blogging is not only a social activity, but is a collaborative process of co-creation in which both bloggers and readers engage. Implications of this finding contribute to the study and understanding of reader participation, to the design of technologies for bloggers and blog readers, and to the development of theoretical understandings of social media.

I’ll post the URL/DOI as well as the final version when they become available. Feel free to contact me for a pre-print draft.

**Update 2011-1-19**: The online edition is now available athttp://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10606-010-9132-9, and I’m pleased to say that the PDF is available at that URL through Springer’s Open Access.

**Update 2011-2-12**: The article now has official volume, issue, and page numbers. Here’s the full citation:

Baumer, E.P.S., Sueyoshi, M., and Tomlinson, B. (2011). Bloggers and Readers Blogging Together: Collaborative Co-Creation of Political Blogs. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 20(1-2), 1-36.

Beitz, M.J., Baumer, E.P.S., and Lee, C.P. (2010). Synergizing in Cybinfrastructure Development. in Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Special Issue on Cyberinfrastructure, 19(3-4), 245-281.

This paper investigates the work of creating infrastructure, using as a case study the development of cyberinfrastructure for metagenomics research. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the role of embeddedness in infrastructure development. We expand on the notion of human infrastructure to develop the concepts of synergizing, leveraging, and aligning, which denote the active processes of creating and managing relationships among people, organizations, and technologies in the creation of cyberinfrastructure. This conceptual lens highlights how embeddedness is not only an important result of infrastructure development, but is also a precursor that can act as both a constraint and a resource for development activities.

I’ll post links and page numbers here once they become available.

Update (2010-07-24): Our Synergizing article is now online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10606-010-9114-y.