David Brake, PhD-student (Media and Communications) at the LSE (not the Stock Exchange, but the London School of Economics and Political Science, where Malinowski was appointed to the first Chair in Social Anthropology in 1927), plans ethnographic research on blogging: “This study will provide a “thick” qualitative description (Geertz 1975) of personal weblogging practice in a particular context – that of authors from across England, purposively sampled to provide demographic variety, who have created their sites using either LiveJournal or Blogger’s software. [What about those who use geek-style software like blosxom? ;-] This description will be based on semi-structured interviews with the authors supplemented by examination of the sites they have produced. It will focus on the manner in which self-performance on weblogs may be constrained by a number of social factors. […]“ Have a look at David’s papers, his personal blog (which has the beautiful URI http://blog.org/), and at the Media@LSE group weblog.
via cyberanthropology