Blog Post #3: Analyzing Purpose(s)

In the very first post on this blog, I linked to a few articles that tried to explain the reasons why people choose to create and post to blogs. Take some time to follow the three links I provided in that entry, and think about some of the many reasons why people blog, according to those articles:

• to provide information about a subject
• to teach others how to do some task
• to entertain their community of commenters
• to express their thoughts and feelings about some issue
• to work out emotions therapeutically
• to build a community who will care about them and engage with them
• to practice their writing skills
• to change the world through persuading others to take action
• to drive traffic to their website or other websites
• to make money or gain other benefits

The blogger's purpose may be one or a combination of these reasons, or even other reasons not listed here. The writer's PURPOSE is one of the features of a rhetorical analysis: is the writer writing to inform, to convince, to persuade, to express, to entertain? When we analyze the effectiveness of communication, we look at how well the communication achieved its purpose with its audience.

The blogger may have a single overriding purpose that drives all posts to the blog, or may have different purposes behind different posts. 

For instance, when I look back over the dozen most recent posts on Karen's Makeup and Beauty Blog, I see a number of posts providing information about cosmetic releases for the Christmas season, the purpose of which seem to be to inform potential users of the cosmetics about their quality and appearance, but also to drive traffic to the sites of the makers of those cosmetics; since Karen receives cosmetics from the companies and also has advertising on her site that pays her when people view her posts, another purpose is likely to make money for herself.

However, Karen also posts fun and entertaining posts that seem to have a different purpose. She has a series of posts called "Share a Tip Tuesdays" that provides information to her audience about how to apply cosmetics; she also has a Monday poll that invites her readers to respond, seemingly to build a community and engage with it. And on weekends she posts fake ads featuring her cat, to entertain her audience:

Of course when she's entertaining and building a community, she's also driving more traffic to her own site and thus making money for herself at the same time.

Over on the blog Making Light, there's a wide variety of posts. Some seem to provide information about the history of the local area, perhaps driving tourism; some seem to be about controversial issues in the news and in politics, such as this post asking readers to think more deeply about the scandal involving Joe Paterno, or this post about TSA agents stealing from airline passengers, or this post about polling in Election 2012. These posts seem to be intended to provide information about a subject, or to convince the readers to share a particular view, or to persuade the readers to take some action.

Other posts are about less serious topics and seem to be posted more for entertainment of the Making Light community, such as a post about the irrational hatred of hats, or a post titled Chupacabra which is written as though it is a serious piece of journalism detailing the history of a viral outbreak, interviewing leading researchers into that virus:

(This was posted to celebrate World Zombie Day).

There are a lot of regular commenters on both sites, so it's safe to assume that for both Karen and the team at Making Light, keeping the community entertained enough to come back regularly is an important purpose. Most blogs are created to communicate with others; a blog with few posts and only a handful of commenters isn't a blog that will survive long. But the reasons why bloggers want to build a community that stays engaged with the blog are very different, and always worth analyzing.

For Blog Post #3, visit a blog that you read regularly or occasionally. Scroll back through the last dozen or so posts to the blog, and make notes about the timing and frequency of posts, the topics being posted on, the tone and style of those posts, the use of images in those posts... any feature of the post that helps you to determine what the purpose(s) of posting those posts in particular and the blog in general might be. Remember to complete your post within two weeks, before the next post goes up on Wednesday, November 7. And label the post with the labels "Blog Post #3" and "Purpose."