personal journals and k-logs. Filter blogs primarily contain observations and evaluations of external, predominantly
public events; personal journals are used to report events in the blogger's life as well as the blogger's cognitive states;
and k-logs (short for knowledge blogs) focus on information and observations focused around an external topic, project
or product (e.g. software or a research project). Personal journal blog types are the most common of the three mentioned
above.
Previous research on weblogs has examined aspects of blogging vis-a-vis the forms and functions of weblogs: as a
distinct genre of CMC ( Herring et al, 2004 , 2005); as social activity (Nardi et al, 2004a); for grassroots journalism
(Gillmor, 2003; Gill, 2004); for political mobilization (Cross, 2005; Drezner & Farrell, 2004); for partisan politics
(Adamic & Glance, 2005); and on the political influence of blogs (Sroka, 2006). Little or no rigorous research appears
to have been done, however, on the role of weblogs in modern electoral processes in Nigeria. This paper begins to
address this lack by first arguing that blogging is a form of work, and by characterizing the activities of bloggers before,
during and after the Nigerian 2007 General Elections.
Clearly stated, the major research questions we seek to address in this paper include:
(a). Will blogging qualify as a variety of work?
(b). What acts do bloggers perform during an electoral process?
(c). Which linguistic elements encode bloggers' sentiments about elections?
In attempting to answer these questions, we hypothesize that:
(I) Blogging is work, in the sense that the activity is mostly selfless and has direct bearing on the life and political
survival of a people.
(II) The major part of bloggers' acts would be more of enlightening and assuring electorates that their votes count
and as a result mobilize them to perform their civic duties before and during elections.
(III)
Certain lexical items contextually encode responsibility and express the mood of the masses.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: arguing for blogging as work, providing background information
on the Nigerian 2007 General Elections, the data and methodology, characterizing bloggers' activities with copious
evidence.
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Convention