Blogging as a matured writing genre: An analysis of formal, organizational, and rhetorical features in Blogger and Wordpress blogs

This study looked at blog writing examples from both WordPress and Blogger to evaluate the current status of blogging as compared with its roughly 20-year history. To conduct my research, I assembled a corpus of 100 blog posts from the top ten blogs (as determined by PostRank), and evaluated each post individually according to its formal elements and organization. Based on the results of my study, I argue that the blog writing genre is characterized by an author's response to and creation of cultural artifacts in a semi-permanent space. Though the purpose for writing may have changed, blogging continues to fulfill a unique role for communicators on the World Wide Web.