This is the text only Version, without the appendix, table of contents etc.

Download paper here

In the unlikely event of anyone being interested in the full package, please feel free to contact me.

I realize my work is far from being perfect, one of typical traps I stumbled right into is wanting to cover too much! Hope someone out there can enjoy the read and get some sort of benefit or inspiration from it. Thank you, indonesian bloggers!

The paper has been finally completed and will be made available for download here shortly.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me out and given their advice and knowledge.

Yea due to a lot of things happening at once I´m more than a little bit lagging behind with updating the progress of my research.
This is just let you know real quick what´s going to come:

Interviews with Pak Pujiono of Jalan Sutera one of my favorite blogs which is quite hilarious... with Santy and Ollie of Jakarta Daily Photo... with Irha of the Makassar Blog Community... with Enda Nasution... and many more!

Results

Certainly, looking at only10 Blogs out of possible 400.000 blogs means that I am far from being able to give accurate, representative figures that speak for all Indonesian blogs.

However, there´s this wonderful term called ‘qualitative representativity’ which applies when content or statements start to repeat themselves and no new aspects seem to come up, so basically the researcher has a fairly well funded notion about having seen the range of possibilities. I´m going to try to apply it here, even though some of you may not agree.

Base data

Out of 10 Blogs, 8 were written by male authors, one by a female and one by a group of authors whose sexes were not specified.

→ I have heard from numerous (trustworthy) sources that there are about as many female bloggers as male bloggers. I have two explanations to why the ratio appears to be in favor of men here:

1. pure coincidence (mathematicians could calculate the chance of this to happen, but I can´t)
2. Perhaps there ARE as many female bloggers out there as male, but they tend to not participate in events like Pesta Blogger so much. Maybe they don´t have the time (family) or maybe they don´t like to be as exposed? Something I should investigate further…

9 out of 10 authors name cities on Java as their home, 6 of these name Jakarta (The capital) and 2 name a city outside of Java. (Some claimed more than one location)

→ Yeah, Java seems to be the hub of internet activity, still, most likely due to the lack of infrastructure such as broadband access and Wifi cafés /Warnet in more remote parts of the country.
→ However, this shows me: bloggers aren´t necessarily true Jakartans or from other major cities. They tend to live there now but may well come from someplace else. They seem to be people with high mobility, able to adapt to places and to identify themselves with more than one ‘home’.

7 out of 10 are written in Indonesian, one mixes Indonesian and English posts, one mixes Indonesian and Javanese posts and one is written entirely in English.

→ This, I guess, is not so surprising. It´s obvious most bloggers use the Indonesian language, on the other hand the ratio of bloggers using English might be higher than in other countries due to the popular concept of ‘bridge blogging’ (blogging about one country in the aim of making it more visible to the outside world)

→ Interesting, but also not so surprising is the integration of Javanese (as one of the more traditional Indonesian languages) into the realm of the blogosphere. My explanation for this is that Indonesians love language, the use of expressions, slang terms and dialects is very common. So it does make sense that Javanese speakers will make use of their language skills, also as a way of displaying ‘local patriotism’ or a sense of belonging.

→I forgot to count the number of posts that use an English title or English expressions or phrases in the text. They were many, many. It seems to me, that English comes easily to Indonesian bloggers, that it´s used and integrated into their own way of speaking without giving it much thought.

8 out of 10 are written from a personal/subjective perspective while 2 mix entries with a subjective flavour and neutral/objective entries.

→ Ok, the above probably sounds confusing. What I looked at here is the language mode of the posts. Written from a personal perspective (“I experienced this and that”) or a neutral perspective (“This and that happened”)? Blogs are a highly subjective media, so the dominance of the personal perspective is to be expected. It will turn interesting when comparing this to blogs in Germany. Germans tend to dislike giving away personal information and tend to prefer the objective and factual. I should find out if this is true also for the language of German blogs.

None of the blogs follow a strict thematic concept. 2 out of 8 are truly ‘open’ to all kinds of content (personal experience, news technology, economy, entertainment, etc…) the rest mix one underlying theme with varying ‘off topic’ posts. 3 out of the remaining 8 deal with technology as underlying theme, 1 with cyberculture and the blogging community, one with photography, one with language and humour, one with personal experiences.

→ There might to be a connection to the results above. If the blogger as a person becomes apparent, then blogs will probably be open to all kinds of experiences of this person rather than being restricted to one sole aspect. Again, comparing it to German blogs should be interesting.
→ Technology, as in tips on how to use certain software, the newest gadgets etc. is one of the most popular themes in the blogging world. Not surprising also that all 3 of the technology-focused blogs are written by men.

The frequency of posting is at about 4-6 posts per moth for most blogs (5 out of 10). 2 post with a frequency of up to 10 posts per month, 3 with a frequency of 2-3 posts a month.

→ yeah this is kind of basic. I think 4-6 posts per month is a frequency that comes naturally to blogging. Again, I´ll wait till I´ve compared it to German blogs.

The average number of comments to one post is 9,9. However, there was one major deviation with 72 comments to one post. This entry analyzed the debate about an internet-company fraud.

→ At first I was surprised about the high number of comments. However, I have heard that this is quite normal in German blogs too. We also have to take into account that the bloggers participating at Pesta Blogger are probably pretty involved in the blogging community, thus used to commenting and generating comments on their own blogs.
→ Some posts stand out in terms of how many comments they generate. The more controversial, funny or outrageous, the more comments. Naturally. Later on in my research I will look at theses ‘hot topics’ more closely.

54 out of 100 posts use and illustrative photo or image
4 out of 100 posts are photo-stories: a series of photos on one subject with little or no text.
2 out of 100 posts include only one photo plus caption.
3 out of 100 posts include video. They were all in the same blog.

→ blogging is a surprisingly languae-based media. In Indonesia, this habit may be amplified due to the lack of high-speed conncetions. However, adding a illustrative photo to the text is common.
→ Other than that, only few posts went into exploring the use of multimedia elements. Photos are clearly dominant, only one blogger inserted video elements. Notably, this blogger was also the only female blogger. I should look into the use of multimedia and see if it´s connected to gender!


… to be continued!

A few days ago I had the honour to meet Wimar Witoelar, who´s blog perspektif online is one of the most popular Indonesian blogs. (Though of course the blog can´t really be separated from the range of media that make up perspektif)

WW- who says he´s something like the mascot of Indonesian bloggers - and I spoke about the role of blogs in contrast with the traditional media. WW told me about his early experiences with the internet during his university time and during the turbulent late 90ies. He set me on track by giving an honest opinion about the involvement of Minister Nuh and Pak Habibie in the Indonesian internet revolution.

Hopefully, I´ll manage to get parts of the interview with WW online soon!

I wasn´t sure at all how to approach something as diverse and intangible as ‘the Indonesian blogosphere’. For sure, I first needed to find out what Indonesian blogs look like and how they work, and of course what bloggers write about!

My first step to approach the Indonesian blogosphere systematically was to conduct a content analysis. That is to say, I chose a handful of blogs, read through their posts and categorized their content. Since my background is in cultural studies, it made sense to especially look at how the individual posts deal with things as cultural background, religion, belonging to certain social groups etc.

Of course, some additional information was also of interest to me, such as the identity of the author, the frequency of posting and so forth.


Method

There are more than 400.000 Indonesian blogs, so there really are plenty to choose from. I decided to choose the list of blogs that was published on pestablogger.com as my sample. (Pesta Blogger 2007 was the first nation-wide bloggers’ festival in Jakarta, held in October 2007) My thinking is as follows: the bloggers who participated at Pesta Blogger are likely to be dedicated bloggers who are in it for more than just a day. They probably aim at keeping their blogs up to date and of interest to fellow bloggers and readers. I could assume that blogs on that list somewhat represent the range of ideas and approaches that are relevant in the Indonesian blogosphere.

About 300 bloggers participated at Pesta Blogger and my first high goal was to pick at least 10% for my content analysis. Of these 30 blogs I wanted to each read and analyze the first 10 posts. It soon became apparent that this would take way too long, so I cut down the number of blogs to 10. These 10 blogs I chose randomly from the list.

Appart from sorting the connten of the posts to my categories, I also took the following data for each blog:

The language, The use of multimedia, the number of comments to each entry, the date of the first and the tenth entry, sex and origin of the author (if available), the perspective of the blog (wheter it´s written in a personal way or neutral) and the kind (whether it´s open to all kinds of content or has a fixed concept).

The analysis was conducted between the 3rd and 20th of December.

The results will take a bit longer... but I´ll post them as soon as possible!