Grassroots in America and China

Blog is one of latest forms of online communication, and present academic studies are mainly on its role in education, politics and business. Few studies are available on grassroots bloggers, still less is the research on the comparison of blog contents in different cultures. This book reports some demographic studies on 60 American and 60 Chinese bloggers randomly collected from the immense blogosphere. Content analysis of posts shows that American and Chinese bloggers mainly document daily lives in their blogs, while serious topics such as sex, politics, and religion are not common. This suggests that the cultural variation may mot play a significant role in determining the contents of blogs, but rather that individual blogging practice is in some sense an international genre. The author also finds that there is a positive relationship between posts and comments, as well as blogrolls and comments. This book is addressed to researchers and students who are intrested in online communication.