Today's young people find themselves in an intense media traffic where many messages have a commercial nature. Some such messages are for example different types of advertising in various media and advertising often plays on the uncertainty that may be common in adoles-cence. New interactive media like Blogs on the Internet has been established in recent years. Mixed types of media content, advertising with different messages, appear in Blogs. Therefore, I am interested in how Blogs on the Internet can influence young people's creation of their identity.

AbstractTitle: ?Fashion be in fashion? ? a qualitative study of the phenomen fashion Blogs (?Mode är på modet? ? en kvalitativ studie av fenomenet modebloggar)Number of Pages: 46 (54 including enclosures)Author: Maria RydströmTutor: Else NygrenCourse: Media and communication studies DPeriod: Spring semester 2007University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science,Uppsala universityAim: Contribute to the understanding of a yet unexplored domain, fashion Blogs. And contribute to a discussion of the roll of fashion Blogs in the swedish fashionindustry.Method: Qualitive textual analysis of three fashion Blogs and interviews with the authors to the three fashion Blogs. Completed with six interviews with experts from the fashionindustry and the blogworld.Main results: The authors behind the fashion Blogs are young women living in big cities.They write about fashionnews, runway trends, fashion items and style outfits worn by them selves. Fashion Blogs provide a new way to follow trends and spread them to the society.

The purpose of this thesisis to examine the female body ideal of the Swedish fitness Blogs and how it is reproduced. To answer the research question five of the most read female fitness Blogs were chosen for a critical discourse analysis. The results show that pictures is an important communication event. The ideal is reproduced by representing bodies with desirable attributes in environments and poses that communicates positive feelings. There is a dialectic relation between picture and text in each published post.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to examine how Blogs are used by public libraries for marketing purposes, and how librarians who blog perceive their blog as a marketing tool. The thesis is based on a qualitative study conducted using asynchronous e-mail interviews with librarians representing eleven different library Blogs. The theoretical framework and concepts are taken from marketing theory, including Kotler's marketing mix, relationship marketing, and theories on the marketing of non-profit organisations, knowledge organizations, the Internet, and Blogs. Our results and analysis reveal that libraries use Blogs because they are an easy tool to use, they represent a new way to inform users about the library, they are a way to improve contact with the users and a way to reach potential users. According to the librarians we interviewed, Blogs can be used to market libraries in a number of different ways: by disseminating information on the library and its various media and events, by providing a forum to demonstrate the skills of the librarians, and as a way of changing the image of the library.

The purpose of this bachelor thesis was to gain a deeper understanding of and examine how library Blogs are realized at public libraries together with the views among librarians regarding the realization of library Blogs.The questions we wanted to answer were: ? How is the library blog realized at the public libraries in this study? ? What are the views among the librarians in this study regarding the realization of the library Blogs?The analytical model in this thesis is Connie Crosby?s six steps on how libraries successfully can realize their Blogs. Four of the six steps were selected: planning, implementation, marketing and measures of success. The methodology used for this study was semi-structured interviews. Two interviews were conducted with three librarians that have partial responsibility of their respective library Blogs.The results of the study show that the process of the library blog can look different in different libraries, and that the respondents had clear views on how the realization of a blog should be done.

Today, we live in a consumption society. We buy products to soothe our needs and desires. Thru material things we can express our own personal identity and shopping is seen more as a pleasure than a need to survive. With the background media- and communication studies, the reason of this study was to explore how Blogs as a social medium can influence the consumption ideal in society. With dialogical analysis and semiotic analysis we wanted to see if we could find a specific consumption culture in the content of six Blogs we did our studies on. We found that the Blogs showed us that there is normal to have everyday luxury and spoil oneself with expensive things.

By exposing their products in Blogs, companies have the opportunity to reach out to hundreds of thousands of consumers daily. Instead of using conventional Internet advertising such as banners and ads, some companies chose to make use of product placement in Blogs. By choosing to expose their products in Blogs, companies use a medium that blog readers are familiar with and can relate to, and can thereby solicit customers for their products and brands.We will examine whether product placements in fashion Blogs are an effective way for businesses to market themselves and their products. We measure this efficiency, by keeping a record of the sales of ten product placed garment and accessories that we have selected from four of the largest Blogs in Sweden. The stores we examine sales of product placed goods in are volume brand stores such as Zara and H&M etcetera.

For the last ten years Internet has become more popular and is now used by most Swedes every day.  Internet has made it possible for many people to access a great deal of information about news all day long. Internet has also made it possible for people to create their own news and comment on happenings as they are taking place. One way to do this is to start your own blog, which is a kind of diary where you can publish your own thoughts about politics and news.In Sweden the media is often referred to as the third governmental power since the media is examining the government and people in power positions and bringing the people as consumers of news closer to the government. There is a theory called agenda setting that says that the media is an actor that shapes the political issues discussed by the people and politicians.In this essay I have used the agenda setting theory and linked it together with the Medias references to Blogs in their news. This I have done to see if the media might be influenced by Blogs.

Purpose  The purpose of this paper is from a consumer perspective analysis whether or not Blogs are affecting a customer?s purchase behaviour to a larger extent compared to traditional marketing methods through TV commercials. Additionally, within the scope of this try to identify the type of consumers that are more influenced to a purchase decision by blog contents compared to others.Methods Through a quantitative approach this study will examine the effectiveness of advertising in Blogs. A survey was used in order to collect data where the respondents corresponded to the population in Sweden in the ages 15-79. Initially the size of the blog audience was estimated and thereafter it was examined how many of these that were affected towards a purchase decision by Blogs.

The aim of this study is about how school librarians useweBlogs as a working tool. I wanted to examine how someschool librarians use weBlogs as a working tool and why theyare using them. I also wanted to know the advantages anddisadvantages they see with this tool. I believe that children andteenagers are interested in social media- tools and also are bigusers and consumers of these tools. Therefore I thought it mightbe interesting to examine how school librarians who havechildren and young people as their main target group, work withweBlogs which is one of many social media tools.The methodology used for this study is interviews.

We have studied the effects that Blogs have on the society through interviews with influential bloggers, a news director and the founder of Sweden?s largest blogprovider.Existing theoretical work by other researchers have been used as a starting point to our thesis. Via a deductive method we then proceeded to test these existing models and viewpoints on the reality.Through our research we have concluded that Blogs, if they co-operate, have an agenda-setting function, and that they can affect newspapers to write about certain topics.We have also discussed Blogs role as media watch dogs. Gunilla Sax, news director, questions the blog world?s ability to fully cover all media, and to deliver a systematic and just review of the media.

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to find out the possibilities for librarians and book bloggers to collaborate. We find this relevant because of Blogs being a new medium that could be useful for librarians to embrace. Book Blogs are often networks of Blogs connected to each other through their common interest in literature and we have examined how this could be of use for librarians.The method we have used is semi-structured interviews, which gave us the possibility to adjust our questions based on the informants? answers, when necessary. Our informants have been both librarians and book bloggers; we have met some of them and interviewed the others by e-mail.

Mediation of fiction has always been one of the main tasks of the public library. The focus on information technology is often seen as a threat and competitor to this task. But technology can also offer new ways to mediate fiction, and the aim of this thesis is to examine how library websites and Blogs can be used for this purpose. The research questions are:? What forms of fiction mediating material exist on library websites and Blogs?? How is the fiction mediating material presented?? Are there any differences between the fiction mediating working methods on websites and Blogs compared with those in physical libraries?The thesis is based on a qualitative content analysis of eight Swedish public library websites and three Blogs, and on a theoretical frame work including literature and research on mediation of fiction, library websites and Blogs, web design and usability.

The number of Blogs, from weBlogs, are increasing every day. Blogs are also becoming more visible in the public debate as well as the awareness of their existance is rising among politicians and citizens. The aim of this thesis is to answer the question what democratic potential Blogs can have. This question will be answered by initially studying the research that exists today about weBlogs and democracy. The second part of the analysis consists of a selection of texts from weBlogs that touches this subject.

This thesis explores the position of book Blogs in the literary system through Robert Escarpit's socio-literary model of the book market. Simultaneously the thesis serves as a test for Escarpit's theory: by actively applying his theory and model to a very new and contemporary actor on the book market I hoped to reach or confirm new insights into the usefulness and validity of Escarpit's work for contemporary socio-literary studies.Three book Blogs were selected for the analysis and interviews were carried out with the authors. The interview questions were formulated specifically for the purpose of extracting the kind of information necessary for an analysis using Escarpit?s theory. As a complement to the interviews, statistics on the type of books reviewed on the Blogs were also compiled.