What is a ‘blogger’?

The definition of a blogger is commonly given as “someone who maintains a blog”. Yet on many sites, including Wikipedia and Dictionary.com, ‘blogger’ does not have its own page, ‘blogger’ forwards to the page for ‘blog’. This week I made an attempt to define ‘blogger‘ on Wikipedia using references from Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, a Pew Internet survey and an essay from danah boyd.  In summary:

A blogger is person who writes a blog (or weblog). Bloggers are not a homogenous group. They have a variety of personal and professional motivations for blogging and they come from a variety of political, economic and social backgrounds. Blogging is not a full-time job for most bloggers, nor is it their main source of income. A blogger can also be a doctor, a mechanic, a lawyer or a musician, and thus bloggers typically maintain a variety of professional professions for which the act of blogging is their communicative outlet with the public.

During the research for my MA thesis titled “What Musicians Can Learn From Bloggers” I spent some time talking both with bloggers and musicians in order to see how the responsibilities of the musician are being affected by the medium. What I found is that the defining characteristics of the 21st century musician reflect those found in the definition for a blogger.

Over the next few weeks I’ll discuss my findings here on the MofM blog – in the meantime, please feel free to comment here on this post or update the Wikipedia page for ‘blogger’ if I left something out.