Constantin Basturea’s blog directed me to a good article that studied the effects of practitioner blog use on power in public relations through self-reported questionnaires. One of the more interesting takeaways from the study is their abstraction of a process that communications practitioners undergo when approaching the blogosphere:

1. Practitioner begins using blogs for “informational purposes,” to learn about the medium.
2. Practitioner begins to implement a more strategic approach to their blog.
3. Practitioner begins using their blog to engage in dialogue with the broader blogging community.

Dialogue with the blogging community seems to be the final stage of this evolution. I wonder how dialogue with blog readers fits into the framework. Many of the readers are probably going to be bloggers themselves, but there is also a substantial population of blog readers who are going to be non-bloggers. Is it worth differentiating between these two different types of dialogue?