Communication Blog: Discourse Structuring and Relationship among Participants

Abstract

In the last decade, blogs became popular and consolidated themselves as important communication system.The research presented in this paper contributes to thecreation of knowledge regarding the characteristics andpotential of blogs as mechanisms of communication andinteraction. The communication possibilities in blogs areanalyzed according to two perspectives: discourse structuring and the relationships among participants. In Blogs, a peculiar discourse structure is used: the Star Graph structure, which requires a centralized organization of messages resulting on a focused discussion. The following relationships are established among the participants: One-to-All, in which the authorpublishes the post, and All-to-One, in which readers commenton the author's post. These two forms of communication areauthor-centered. The All-to-All relationship, providedindirectly through links among blogs and also through the use of a mechanism to respond to a comment, allows interaction among all participants but weakens the centralized organization of messages. As a result of this research, a discourse structure that enables an All-to-All relationship while maintaining the centralized structure is proposed: the Links-Enriched Centralized Organization. This proposal allows tracking quotations, thus providing a betterunderstanding of the conversation while keeping the focus onthe post.