Scholarly hyperwriting: The function of links in academic weblogs

Weblogs are gaining momentum as one of most versatile tools for online scholarly communication. Since academic weblogs tend to be used by scholars to position themselves in a disciplinary blogging community, links are essential to their construction. The aim of this article is to analyze the reasons for linking in academic weblogs and to determine how links are used for distribution of information, collaborative construction of knowledge, and construction of the blogʹs and the bloggerʹs identity. For this purpose I analyzed types of links in 15 academic blogs, considering both sidebar links and in-post links. The results show that links are strategically used by academic bloggers for several purposes, among others to seek their place in a disciplinary community, to engage in hypertext conversations for collaborative construction of knowledge, to organize information in the blog, to publicize their research, to enhance the blogʹs visibility, and to optimize blog entries and the blog itself.