Bloggers and Readers

We met up today to talk about how the various blogs we're looking at are being used. We had a really interesting and useful meeting, and we're starting to think about a range of different issues affecting bloggers and their blogs including gender, ethnicity, seniority, anonimity, identity, therapy, to name just a few!

At the heart of our research is a consideration of why bloggers blog. However one of the issues we talked about today was why readers read the blogs.

So, if you're a blogger or a reader (or both!), please participate in the research using the comments box below, and let us know what your motivations are for writing your blog, or for reading blogs.

Looking at blogs

Area Trace No Search
200 Weeks
The Thinking Policeman
One Man and his Plod
pc bloggs: a twenty first century police officer
Welcome to Toy Town
Response Plod
Panda Tales
Sergeant Simon
Political Police
World Weary Detective
Police Inspector Blog
The Blue Light Run
Hog Day Afternoon
Tales from the Metropolis
Travails across Safer Neighbour hoods
The Adventures of Policeboy
Shijuro is not georgedixon's Blog
You want to be a hero?


I've been looking for and reading police blogs this week and have found quite a few. Many are not current and about a dozen found so far have either been deleted or are private - establishing the obvious difficulty with these blogs of confidentiality and the importance of keeping their identities secret. These are the current ones I've found so far. (I'm seeing anything with a post this year as current)

If you know of other ones I haven't come across yet please leave a link to them.

The Project Team

The project team are:

• Dr Simon Burnett (Information and Communication Theme Leader, IMaGeS)



• Dr Sarah Pedersen (Reader, Department of Communication, Marketing and Media, Aberdeen Business School)



• Dr Rob Smith (Reader, Department of Management, Aberdeen Business School)



• Ms Anne O'Neill (Research Assistant, IMaGeS)

The aims of the project

We are aiming to achieve the following objectives through our research project:

· To determine whether stories in blogs are an effective way of sharing and transferring knowledge and learning from experience
· To determine whether stories in blogs are an effective way of educating the public.
· To identify how such story telling and blogging can be used as a form of therapy by the blogger.
· To identify the benefits/barriers to storytelling in blogs within the Police Services
· To identify any differences between the services or the difference sexes within such story telling and blogging.

We are actively looking for police bloggers to participate in the research so please get in contact if you would like to know more.

The project is based at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen.

What and Why

This blog is being set up to complement a research project into the extent of, and reasons for, blogging in the UK police forces. It is believed there are several different motivations at work, including therapeutic reasons, knowledge transfer and inter-communication.

The idea is to use this blog to update on progress and ideas, provide links to relevant blogs and allow the researchers involved in the project to contribute and keep abreast of each others' progress.