Abstract
Drawing upon a stage in the development of blogging in Malaysia from 2007 to 2009, this chapter outlines the emergence of the lifestyle blog from the personal blog. Drawing upon actor-network theory and the conceptualisation of branding work as affective relational labour, it argues that the advertising market was able to integrate personal bloggers, and capitalise upon the ability to closely measure online activity, to restabilise the disruption caused by the ‘voicy consumers’.
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Notes
- 1.
Interview details are, in order of appearance: Tommy, August 2008; Andrew, August 2009; Alvin, October 2009; Chee Keong, July 2008; Nicky, October 2009; James, February 2009. To maintain confidentiality, pseudonyms are used and blog post URLs are not provided.
- 2.
http://petalingstreet.org/ (accessed 14.05.2016).
- 3.
Banner advertisements were a significant part of the advertising strategies, but are not discussed in detail here due to lack of space and close similarities in terms of analysis with conventional mainstream media advertisements.
- 4.
Blog post, Maango, May 2007.
- 5.
The term “glocalisation” that originated in the sphere of international marketing was introduced in social and cultural sciences by Roland Robertson (1992, pp. 173–174).
- 6.
At the time, one advertorial could pay between MYR 500 and 4,500. A starting graduate monthly salary in Malaysia was about MYR 2,000.
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Hopkins, J. (2020). The Lifestyle Blog Genre. In: Friese, H., Nolden, M., Rebane, G., Schreiter, M. (eds) Handbuch Soziale Praktiken und Digitale Alltagswelten. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-08357-1_68
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