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Overview Of The Community Of American Political Weblogging

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While the upper panel contains the main title of the blog and the subtitle with some of iconic images or photos, the central column, however, contains the frequently updated posts, or blog entries created by the blog author. Many blog pages feature a list of links to web sites of particular value to the blogger within the context of the blog's communicative purpose. The side columns include a number of navigational tools that can help access the weblog content such as search engine, blogrolls, archives, tags, and trackbacks. However, the lower column includes copyright information about weblog content, affiliations as well as software related information. Understanding how these columns are designed and what type of information they allow requires …show more content…

In addition to providing enhanced content organization and navigation, Du (2008) states that recent generation of weblog platforms display advanced social interaction features such as tagging, replying, social bookmarking or using advanced web feeds. Readers can subscribe and choose from multiple categories of content feeds, reply to a comment by other visitors or bookmark a post entry and share it with others in another social media. Therefore, weblogs are rich in medial capabilities that may play a role in shaping the generic features of the political weblog genre and realizing the communicative purposes of the community of American political …show more content…

According to Meraz (2007), the only platforms to discuss politics in the late 1990's were message boards such as Salon's Table Talk or Free Republic. Politically oriented blogs first emerged after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as Americans turned to blogs to express their feelings about terrorism and to locate information not available in the mainstream media. Many of the bloggers began blogging about the potential for a war with Iraq. Some of these bloggers such as Instapundit, Daily kos began to attract wide readership because of their discussions of American domestic and foreign events and policies. Political blogs had become a mainstream by 2004. Both political elite and traditional media institutions began to adopt the blogging practice. Presidential candidate –ranging from Howard Dean to George Bush- had started their own blogs and both of the major political parties had granted press credentials to political bloggers to cover their conventions (Meraz,

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