I like the whole idea of voice and have a feeling that this could be a distinctive feature of the written aspect of blogging. I say voice, but I really mean voices - in a sort of Bakhtinian way. I don’t have any strong theoretical reference points for the concept of voice, and I’m even uncertain how that really differs from style, but it seems to make sense that to the extent that blogs are keeping going the narrative of the self they almost inevitably have those linguistic traces that constitute voice.

What made me think this was reading a comment from Dr Joolz on my blog which went

Your blog is very newsy lately. You are so good at keeping uptodate and I am trying to copy.
And that sounded a bit like Julia, but also a bit like Julia pretending to be Kate. Now pinning that down is difficult and could also be WRONG, but I do get a real sense of voice in the comment. It’s also interesting that because of the power relations in blogging (you are, when you leave a comment, simply adding to what the owner of the blog has said, creating a sort of footnote, after all) most people tend to move towards a more informal speech-like register - moving in the direction of chat. Pehaps in chat, or at least in the way we write when we want to sound chatty, we get a bit closer to the distinctiveness of voice. It would be interesting just to focus on the linguistic features of people’s comments….