Roles of Bloggers

Anyone with an internet connection and some ideas can blog. But what does it mean to be a blogger? What roles do bloggers need to fill? Are they creators of content or merely regurgitating information? Bloggers can fulfill multiple roles, depending on the focus of the blog and the intended audience. Not all bloggers carry out all roles, but the majority of them have many of the same roles in common.

First of all, bloggers are writers. This can be very different from authors/storytellers. The writing on a blog can take many forms. Just as in "real life", there are different types of writing, such as business proposals, memos, personal letters, or short stories. Bloggers write, and the type of writing on a personal blog may take on different modes depending on the type of writer that blogger is. Bloggers may also take on different writing roles throughout the career of a particular blog, depending on things like readership and audience.

Blog writers who are authors or storytellers create content. This content may appear as entertaining tales about an event, someone's day or can be complete fiction. An example of a blog as fiction is What is happening to me where the writer takes on the persona of a fictional character who slowly discovers he is a werewolf. There are many other blogs like this one that are complete fiction, some written from the point of view of fictional characters. Sometimes these fictional bloggers interact with other fictional bloggers. This blend of creativity could not be possible with the interactivity inherent in running a blog, which I'll explore a bit later. This sense of interactivity, of an event happening in real time differs from fiction appearing in books or magazines because a reader can comment on the story at any time and possibly affect changes.

Another type of blog writer is a reporter. A reporter chronicles events as they happen. A blogger as reporter has many challenges. Unlike a reporter who works for an established newspaper or other publication, the blog reporter (unless hosted by a reliable news outlet) has no such guarantee of reliability. Even if the blogger is perfectly honest, their credibility is difficult to prove.

A reporter or chronicler of events is different from an editorialist. The kind of writing involved in writing an editorial differs from both of the above examples. Editorialists describe their own opinions based on facts or other situations. These opinions can cover anything from the war in Iraq to the best type of muffins to bake for the holidays. Like much of the content in some blogs, these editorials come from personal experiences. Unlike the editorials published in newspapers, there is no guarantee of authority or credibility.

Lastly in this list of writers we have historian or journalist. Bloggers can simply be chronicling their daily life experiences. Similar to the diaries of historical figures, these diaries serve as written (if electronically written) record of the life lived in the twenty first century. Archaeologists of the future will be able to piece together our daily lives from what's left behind, like the imprints left behind in Pompeii. (This is assuming of course that digital archiving takes place and the data lasts long enough, which is a topic for another post).

We've established that bloggers are writers, though the kind of writing that might be done will vary. Bloggers also function as aggregators of information. I found a great comment on Cal Evan's blog on the idea of the role of blogger to be a librarian who finds information and shares it. The librarian may vet the information, to give readers the good content and not the bad, or the librarian may be completely impartial, giving the user all information available, including the good and bad aspects of a source to let the reader make up their own mind.

Blogger librarians differ greatly from true librarians. Bloggers might be scavenging for information, links, urls, etc based on a particular field of interest. And while librarians in real life might do the same, creating pathfinders for users, their role goes beyond what is available online. (And let's save the roles of librarians for another post!)

Bloggers might be evaluators of content. They might review particular sources, sites, urls or other blogs before passing them on. (see above re: editorialist). This role might act in concert with others. An evaluator might be given items to evaluate or review, such as novels, and then discuss them. Or they may pick and choose items on their own which to share.

Bloggers who are researchers might straddle both of the above roles. They might share the information they've found, they may merely share links, they may evaluate or they may do nothing more than collect information in relation to a certain topic.

Blogs are interactive. Users comment on specific posts and hopefully the blog owner will respond to these comments. Bloggers can be leaders of discussions. They can lead communication by posing a question or a conundrum in posts and moderate the discussion that follows.

Bloggers who are involved with readers and comments may be commenters themselves. A blogger's reputation will be formed when they sign their name to comments in another blog's posts. Someone who blogs in a platform such as Livejournal or MySpace has more of a dialog with other bloggers through the "friend" functions. So in these circumstances, the bloggers' role is to be a 'friend/commenter.' Now, sometimes those friended by users of these types of blogs are actual friends of the individual writing. Other times they may be merely fans of the blogger in question. There should be no assumed actual "friendship" relation in this dynamic.


Public relations may be key to the identity of a particular blogger. Some blogs attached to a corporation like the ones looked at in the previous entry are dedicated to showing the user new content and products put out by that particular company. So the role of that blogger is to be a PR person for that firm. This may differ from traditional public relations because the efforts are limited to the readers of the blog.

A company may also use a blog to direct a particular project. So the blogger might be a project manager. The blog can update the potential user of a product, as well as members of a team on the status of the project. An example of this is the Sony Playstation Developer's Corner blog, which keeps gamers informed on the status of game development and other Playstation issues.


Bloggers are often gurus: experts in a particular topic or field. For example, see Librarian in Black or Miss Snark, the Literary Agent. These experts set up their blogs as testaments to their experience and know-how, so others may learn from them. Miss Snark especially, since she has closed her blog to new posts, leaves behind a record of her knowledge. It may be difficult to find a mentor of a particular topic or subject area in person, so this function of a blogger makes vast amounts of expertise available to anyone with an internet connection, not merely disciples of a particular school of thought at a university. This is particularly useful in areas of technology where readers can find experts in software development to answer specific questions about specific products or programming languages.

Expanding from this idea of being a guru, bloggers are also teachers. Bloggers can teach readers in many ways. This differs greatly from a traditional teacher in a classroom. A blog can aid students; it can be a place to go for clarification or more information. This doesn't replace face to face contact, however it can supplement it.

Bloggers can be students themselves. Posts can function as learning experiences. Unlike in a normal classroom however, anyone can stumble upon these learning experiences. This can make the learning interactive, and possibly embarrassing, as it opens mistakes to others who the information was never intended for.

Bloggers have a unique role as web designers of their particular blog. Various blog services provide users with different levels of control over their blogs, some have templates, and others require some knowledge of coding. Some bloggers may choose to customize their blogs more than others. But the design of a blog affects more than just the aesthetics of a web page. Poorly designed blogs make it difficult for readers to find past posts on related topics. This illuminates yet another roles of bloggers - that of information organizers. They are responsible for the arrangement of their own content. Some blog software makes this easy, providing archives and tags. But bloggers must make use of these functions if readers are to make sense of the hundreds of posts of a just discovered blog, or the blog of a guru whose expertise they want to tap.

Lastly, and most importantly, bloggers are readers. Blogs don't exist in a vacuum. A blogger must read, not only information on the internet, but other print resources. (of course, that could be the librarian in me) Bloggers read other blogs, evaluate the information and then choose to share it or not. Without reading and evaluation of ideas, there can be no writing. And that brings us full circle back to the main role of bloggers: writers.