Are They All Becoming Corporate Blogs?

In the recent Times Top 25 Blogs 2009 The Official Google Blog was the only "corporate blog" to make the list. While this is certainly an achievement you could almost argue that other blogs which made the cut such as the Huffington Post or Mashable have become corporates in their own right...so where this distinction is drawn? What makes a Corporate Blog "Corporate"...is a successful blogging empire that makes serious coin now a corporation? Can successful blogs avoid being seen as "corporates" in the eyes of the reader? If so how? If they can't what will the affect of this be, will that corporate image tarnish the content, the perceived independence, and the trust in the blog? I'll Ask500, but would love to hear what you think?

Image from http://www.blogbiz.de/

Research Proposal Approved

So I've finally been given the green light from Otago University which means that this blog and its twitter account are about to go wild!

Over the last few weeks I've read a hell of a lot of articles, been playing around with Linux and working on a solution for one of the Internets biggest issues, but if this wasn't enough life is about to get a whole lot more intense....interviews interviews interviews.

This coming Tuesday my first dummy interview will get underway, I'll be talking to Phil Osborne who is a prolific blog reader and a lecturer at Otago Uni. He'll be my guinea pig for my interviewing technique and research methodology.

So you can start getting excited coz by next Wednesday you can expect to be fully informed on anything important that transpires....

After that the Snowball will begin and I'll start posting regularly about the insights I gain from the people I talk to :)

Research Design

I figured that it was quite possible that if you're interested in my research then you're probably interested in how exactly I'm going to go about gaining a insight into readers perceptions of corporate blogs. So I decided to dedicate a post to describing my research design.

I realize that most of you don't want too much info about my methodology because lets face it it's not the sexiest of topics, to keep things simple I've posted basic links about each technique.

Anyway the research design is as follows:

• Snowball Sampling will be used to find participants.
• Semi-Structured Interviews will be used to gather data.
• The audio and visual data of these interviews will be recorded and Jing will be used to record any websites that participants decide to show me.
• I will then personally transcribe all the data...fun times!
• Two methods of Content Analysis will be used to analyze the data.
• Thematic Analysis will be used to pick up any themes of interest.
• Word frequency Analysis which is simply counting the number of times a word appears in a body of text - will also be used to triangulate the resulting themes from the Thematic Analysis and pick up any themes that may have been missed.

From all of the steps listed above I hope to be able to gain greater perspective on what it is that blog readers value and how corporate blogs can be brought in line with these values.

Please be aware that the embedded links in the above text are very simple explanations of each step in my methodology, if you have any question or would like a more in depth explanation of each technique please just ask.

Sam