We've gone live. Here's the official release note:
Announcing---
Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs
ed. Laura Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman, University of Minnesota

This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. The collection takes a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others.

Into the Blogosphere is a first in many ways. Along with its being the first scholarly collection focused on the blog as rhetorical artifact, the editors also offer an innovative approach to intellectual property and to publishing. There are a number of peer reviewed journals in digital format. However, with an edited collection, the desired outcome is usually a hard-copy book, so the standard process has been to turn to a publisher with a proposal, then typically wait several years before the book actually comes out.

The editors produced this peer-reviewed edited collection in the spirit of blogging but with a focus on scholarly work that has been through the peer review process (full blind reviews were conducted). The book takes advantage of the speed of electronic publishing, the web's hypertextual nature and new ways of reading, and the formatting and open communication conventions of blog writing, while at the same time providing readers with essays that are of a serious scholarly quality. The blog, in this case, is the subject matter and it is also the book itself. It is not an ancillary web site that accompanies a hard copy book.

Inspired by the collaboration and sharing of ideas common among bloggers, the editors have also chosen to distribute this online collection under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 2.0 License. It is hosted on the University of Minnesota library’s server as part of the University's innovative new blog initiative, UThink: Blogs at the University of Minnesota Libraries.

Cross-posted to CultureCat.