A simple method for recognizing corporate flogs

I’ve been working on a research paper dealing with the language and style of corporate blogs, specifically Life at Wal-Mart, for a few weeks now. My suspicion - that I think I can express with a good deal of certainty now - is that Life at Wal-Mart is a fake blog (or flog) in the sense that it would not be described as genuine by most people who know what a blog is.

How do I know?

Well, there are several indicators. In the 52 entries that I have analyzed there is not a single hyperlink, nor is there any instance where an external source (another blog, news website etc) is quoted.

Not once.

Of course it isn’t impossible for a blog to not link or quote, but it is a severe deviation from the norm. Another thing that struck me (and there are many more indicators that are listed in detail in the paper) is something mind-numbingly simply but quite salient:

Blogs contain the word blog. Life at Wal-Mart doesn’t.

Certainly newspaper editorials and scientific papers are bound to have a higher frequency of the terms editorial and paper than other types of texts, but the number of blogs without the word blog in them beats the statistical significance of that by a huge leap. It’s rather impossible, it seems, to blog without talking about it and when people talk about it they have no choice but to use that term, because it’s the only one we currently have. The New York Times is unlikely to be full of references to the Washington Post for obvious reason, but in blogs mentioning other sources, quoting and linking them is the standard practice. And even if you don’t do it, any sort of reflection on what you’re doing will practically force you to use the word. Blogs that don’t either A) link to or quote other blogs or B) contain some kind of meta-language can be described as virtually impossible and my corpus data reflects that.

So, what does that mean? Well, obviously a blog can be fake and still use the term blog in every single post. But if ad copy, testimonials or other textual building blocks from commercial genres are simply stuffed into Wordpress and the result is called a blog, this method should pick it up.