Something I’ve been working on for some time is how authors develop communities using social software. That one is an article I intend to finish! As part of that article, about a year ago I started looking at the uses made of blogs in librarianship and other profession and came up with this list:

• As a publicity tool to increase the author’s profile in a sector
• As a portfolio and personal repository
• As a professional development tool to track learning, initiatives and observations
• As a new method of publishing (eg essay style blogs which mimic old publishing methods and transform them to blogs eg my post below containing print-world elements of figures, endnotes and references)
• As publicity and development tools/updaters/pre-empters for traditional publications (eg Lessig’s jotbook for Code v2)
• As dedicated work spaces for upcoming traditional publications (including progress updates on findings, content previews etc, eg Libraries Build Communities) 
• As general work spaces to update on the process of producing a ‘traditional’ publication or research, (as opposed to providing updates/previews of the actual research work)
• Survey distribution and reporting

What I hope to do with this list is to work out relationships betweens bloggers and their inclination towards peer-reviewed publishing amongst other things.