Syfte: Att undersöka vad personer med cancer skriver i bloggar om sina upplevelser av sin sjukdomssituation och sitt bloggande. Metod: Deskriptiv kvalitativ studie omfattande tio bloggar. Strategiskt och maximalt varierat urval gällande kön, ålder, cancerdiagnos samt bot­barhet. Bloggsökning genom­fördes i sökmotorn Google. Datainsamling skedde med egenutvecklad granskningsguide omfattande två huvudfrågor med delfrågor. Dataanalys genomfördes med kvalitativ innehållsanalys enligt Granheims och Lund­mans modell (2004). Resultat: Bloggförfattarna beskriver sina upp­levelser av sin sjukdoms­situation utifrån sina känslor, sin in­ställ­­ning till sjukdomen och livet, sjuk­domens påverkan samt sitt förhållande till andra männi­skor. Skri­benterna beskriver bety­delsen av blog­gandet i förhål­lande till sig själva, där blog­gandet upp­levs utgöra en form av terapi eller coping­strategi, och i relation till läsarna, där blog­gen kan innebära ett stöd eller en möjlighet att hjäl­pa andra. Slutsats: Då personer med cancer skriver öppet om sina upplevelser i bloggar utgör en cancerblogg ett lämp­ligt red­skap för att öka förståelsen för cancer­sjukas sjukdoms­situation. En blogg kan fungera som terapi och coping­strategi för cancerdrabbade. Den kan även innebära ett psyko­socialt stöd, både i form av feed­back från läsare och genom att ingå i ett socialt nät­verk. / Aim: To investigate what cancer patients write in blogs about their experiences of their situation and blogging. Method: Descriptive qualitative study of ten blogs. Strategic and maximally varied sample with respect to gender, age, diagnosis and curabi­lity. A blog search was carried out in Google. Data collection was performed with a specially developed question guide. The data were analysed using qualitative content analysis according to Granheim and Lundman (2004). Results: Blog authors describe their experiences of their situation based on their feelings, their attitudes towards the disease and life, the impact of the disease and their relationship with other people. They describe the blogging in relation to them­selves, perceiv­ing it as a form of therapy or coping strategy, and in relation to their readers, seeing the blog as a way of support or helping others. Conclusions: As cancer patients write openly about their exper­iences in blogs, a can­cer blog is a suitable tool to increase understanding of the situation of cancer patients. A blog can serve as a therapy and coping strategy for cancer patients. It can also provide psycho­social support, both in terms of feedback from readers and by enabling the author to become part of a social network.

With the rise of Web 2.0 concept, the development of virtual communities focuses more on the factors of relationship and interaction. Micro-blogging, the kind of community platforms that limit the length of a post and emphasize real-time and interactive features, has become popular these years. Seeing the potential of micro-blogging marketing, many businesses start to use micro-blogging as a promotional channel. With the different characteristics and multiple features of micro-blogging services, however, most businesses are still exploring how to make relationship marketing successful. This study uses commitment-trust theory by Morgan & Hunt (1994) to investigate the building of trust and commitment between users and communities and their influence on community loyalty from the perspective of relationship commitment. An online-survey was conducted among Plurk users, and 300 valid respondents were used for data analysis by structural equation modeling (SEM). The results indicate that commitment and trust have a significantly positive effect on loyalty. Trust is significantly influenced by shared values, communication and opportunistic behavior, and commitment is significantly influenced by relation-ship benefits and trust. Information quality and shared values, however, do not have significant impact on commitment. Furthermore, user characteristics and usage frequency have significant moderating effect on the level of causal influence. The results show the importance of trust and commitment building in micro-blogging and provide useful suggestions for micro-blogging marketing.

New media technology has brought heated debate about its power to transform existing structures and relations in national and international communications. It is expected to either democratize or reproduce current political communication processes. At the same time, new media technology raises concerns that it may promote a global convergence of communication cultures to the American model. Political blogging, online personal publishing of observations and comments about news and politics with frequent links to other Web sources, provides a useful ground to test these competing theses since political blogging emerged as a citizen-based, alternative media in the U.S. and has subsequently been diffused internationally. This dissertation compares political blogs in the U.S., the U.K., and Germany to investigate how national political systems and communication cultures shape the structures and practices of political blogging across the three countries. Based on the media’s relative power in the public sphere and communication processes, political communication culture is distinguished as a mediatized culture in the U.S., a politicized culture in Germany, and a culture-in-between in the U.K. Different systems and cultures are predicted not only to foster political blogging to varying degrees but also to shape different fabrics of relations among political bloggers and other participants in political communication in each country. Using the rankings of political blogs in the three countries, the 106 top political blogospheres and linking patterns of individual political blogs to various websites in the countries. Findings from this dissertation reveal both cross-national commonalities rooted in general human tendencies and national particularities emerging from different structural factors internal to the three countries. Across the three countries, bloggers make more communicative ties to politically like-minded blogs and websites than to those with opposing perspectives. Blogging networks of the three countries represent very unequal spaces, with a few blogs having a disproportional number of incoming links. Also, blogs are highly insulated geographically with bloggers making links mostly to other bloggers and sites within their own countries. There are also notable cross-national differences in network structures and linking patterns. The U.S. blogging network has more dense interconnections among its members compared with British and German networks. Also, America’s mediatized culture increases the probability that political blogs choose to link more to news media sites compared to British and German bloggers. On the other hand, British and German blogs in politicized cultures make links to government websites more frequently than do American blogs. Additionally, the U.S. political blogosphere shows greater segregation between blogs of competing political perspectives, compared with U.K. and German blogospheres. Findings are discussed in light of two key questions about the nature of political blogging (1) as a new technology-enabled medium facilitating cross-national convergence in communication practice, and (2) as a revolutionary venue revitalizing the public sphere and democracy. / text

Blogging is a form of social media, and student engagement is at the center of blogging. The benefits of blogging include being easy to create and maintain, making writing easier to share, encouraging students to write outside of the classroom, and supporting group collaboration. The findings suggest students are more passive in their blogging experiences, as the data found students generally read blogs more than they wrote blogs. The Unified Theory on Acceptance and Use of Technology and self-efficacy theory were used as the framework for the study. This study sought to explore agricultural leadership students’ motivations for blogging. Student responses indicated on average they read blogs less than once a month. Students typically reported a preference for informal writing even if they did not blog. Teacher training could be used to increase awareness among educators about the benefits of blogging. Educators must be able to convey the benefits of educational blogging in terms of its ease and benefit for student acceptance.

Der Beitrag untersucht die Weblog-Arbeit Studierender zur Dokumentation und Reflexion von Praxisprojekten. Zu Beginn und nach Abschluss einer Lehrveranstaltung mit Praxisphase wurden Studierende zur Weblog-Arbeit befragt. Es zeigt sich, dass die Studierenden kaum über Erfahrungen in der Nutzung von Weblogs verfügen und überwiegend negative Einstellungen zum Bloggen aufweisen. Die Blogeinträge erreichen nicht die angestrebte Reflexionstiefe. Es wird diskutiert, wie das didaktische Design gestaltet werden kann, um die gewünschten Effekte ‒ Peer-Feedback und tiefgehende Reflexion ‒ zu erreichen.

Submitted by Dilene Paulo (dilene.fatima@ufcg.edu.br) on 2017-12-01T15:44:03Z No. of bitstreams: 1 ANDRÉ LUIZ FIRMINO ALVES - DISSERTAÇÃO PPGCC 2014.pdf: 8491551 bytes, checksum: 9c049bdf4b551742efcd94bdc4c8c020 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-12-01T15:44:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 ANDRÉ LUIZ FIRMINO ALVES - DISSERTAÇÃO PPGCC 2014.pdf: 8491551 bytes, checksum: 9c049bdf4b551742efcd94bdc4c8c020 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Capes / A proliferação dos meios de comunicação social na Web, tais como blogs, fóruns de discussões, sites de avaliação de produtos, microblogs e redes sociais, proporcionou um volume de dados opinativos armazenados em formato digital nunca visto na história da humanidade. Esta quantidade de dados, em sua grande maioria não estruturados, tem trazido vários desafios e oportunidades para a comunidade acadêmica e o mundo dos negócios, haja vista a necessidade de compreender, de forma automática, os sentimentos das pessoas a respeito de um produto, um serviço ou mesmo sobre pessoas ou fatos, para auxiliar no processo de tomada de decisão. Nos últimos anos, surgiram várias contribuições científicas para resolver problemas relacionados à análise de sentimentos. No entanto, poucas propostas consideram o fator espaço-temporal, isto é, a localização geográfica da fonte de informação ou da própria informação, bem como as possíveis mudanças de opinião ao longo do tempo. Os trabalhos que consideram o fator espacial tomam como base mensagens já geocodificadas, contudo, são poucas as fontes de informações que dispõem de mensagens georeferenciadas. Neste contexto, este trabalho propõe uma abordagem de análise de sentimentos que explora os fatores espaço-temporal para melhor sumarizar o sentimento detectado em uma grande quantidade de microtextos obtidos daWeb. A abordagem utiliza técnicas de Recuperação da Informação Geográfica (GIR) e técnicas de Análise de Sentimentos para detectar localizações geográficas e a polaridade dos sentimentos através de evidências textuais contidas nos microtextos, oferecendo mecanismos de visualização espacial do sentimento em diversas regiões geográficas. A análise espaço-temporal possibilita visualizar mudanças de sentimento ocorridas em diversas regiões geográficas ao longo do período analisado. / The dissemination of social communication means on the Web, such as blogs, discussion forums, product evaluation sites, microblogs and social networks, provides a never before seen volume of opinionative data in digital format. Not structured in its majority, this amount of data, has brought several challenges and opportunities for the academic community and the business world, considering the need for understanding, in an automatic form, people’s sentiments concerning a product, a service or even other people or facts, in order to facilitate the decision making process. In the recent years, several scientific contributions to solve sentiment analysis related problems were suggested. However, only a few of them consider the spatial-temporal factor, which is the geographical location of the information source or even of the information itself, as well as the possible opinion changes throughout time. The works that consider the spatial factor often assume the messages are already geocoded. However, it could be a problem, since only a few information sources provide georeferenced messages. In this context, this work proposes a sentiment analysis approach which explores the spatial-temporal factor in order to better summarize the sentiments detected in a great amount of microtexts obtained from the Web. The approach uses Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) and Sentiment Analysis techniques for the detection of geographic locations and sentiment polarity through textual evidences contained in the microtexts. The spatialtemporal analysis enables the visualization of sentiment changes which occurred in several geographic regions throughout the analyzed time period.

This study focuses on blogging, as one of the possible uses of the computer in an Afrikaans class in order to improve integration between the learning areas in a school environment. It was a new experience for learners, especially the use of technology in an Afrikaans class. The researcher wanted to determine how learners will handle frustration in a new situation, with the focus on the different components operating in a school environment: the frustration caused by the use of the technology, the subjects / learners themselves, the rules they had to adhere to, the community they lived in: teacher, other learners, parents, who had to consider the project viability. The most important recommendation is that this type of exercise should become a preferred way of teaching and learning, due to its educational value in shaping learner’s minds and guiding teachers to see and do things differently in a technology driven society. / Dissertation (MEd (Computer Integrated Education))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Curriculum Studies / unrestricted

This thesis aims at defining the archival narrative from the discourse between archivists and historians writing on “archives as subject”. The objectives of this thesis are to identify and define the characteristics of archival narrative and to apply these characteristics to archival blogging. Qualitative and reflective, this research conducted a comprehensive and systematic literature review on “archives as subject” to produce a conceptual framework that defines archival narrative and its characteristics. A content analysis was also conducted to determine how the characteristics defining archival narrative are represented within archival blogs. The content analysis identifies, refines and defines the characteristics of archival narrative. As archives evolve in the digital world, social media and the demand for increased patron engagement, archivists’ must recognize their own expertise while sharing the characteristics of archival narrative. This will contribute to a more transparent and accountable archival profession.

Missionaries serving in foreign countries provide a unique perspective on culture that they chronicle on public blogs. A content analysis of these blogs showed that missionaries use their own cultural and religious frame to make observations, some good and some bad, about cultural habits and beliefs foreign to their own. Through the medium of blogging, we see how missionaries use self-narratives to understand and make sense out of differences in culture and beliefs that ultimately impact how they identify themselves.

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