Personal and Popular. The Case of Young Swedish Female Top-bloggers

Abstract

While early blogging research focused on top-ranked blogs commenting on public events, recent research confirms that most blogs today concern the personal life of the blogger. The present article focuses on a particular case of blogs that falls in between these categories. In Sweden, personal blogs written by young women have dominated the ranking lists of the most popular blogs during recent years. This new phenomenon is approached through an analysis of the characteristics and content of 20 top-ranked blogs authored by young women. Through their popularity, these bloggers have come to introduce commercial and professional aspects of blogging that challenge the conventions of personal blogs. The ar ticle analyses how the bloggers negotiate these conventions in self-presentations, postings and relations to readers and how they seek to perform a self through the blog that integrates different aspects of blogging. A crucial part of this process is identification with the gender conventions of “ordinary girls”.