Uses of Blogs brings together scholars and practitioners from a wide range of fields to offer a broad spectrum of perspectives on current and emerging uses of blogs. Blogging is rapidly developing into a mainstream activity for Internet users, but beyond the popular headlines, there has been very little serious research done on their actual application in specific, everyday contexts. One reason for this is that the variety of styles of blogging - news blogs and political commentary blogs, marketing blogs, corporate dark blogs, fictional blogs, educational blogs, to name just a few - make it difficult to generalize and to imagine how blogs might be used in particular environments. This pathbreaking new book demonstrates the application of blogs and blogging in the full range of industrial and social contexts.