Thanks Ton for pointing me in the direction of the research about LiveJournal.

I have to confess I am not much of a bridge, as I was not invited on to LiveJournal - I paid for an account - and I am not linked into any of the communities on it.

I chose LiveJournal because it seemed the most overtly multicultural of all the blog software and hosts I looked at. It also had features that made it 'high context' - ie add features other than text to communicate such as ability to customise the look quite radically, user profile including interests (searchable), emoticons, what music am I listening to etc. I realise other blog software can let you do this, but I was too lazy to learn the programming for it. I also wanted to see what the relationship was between 'high context' features and intercultural communications.

There seems to be some kind of "the more high context the communications technology, the more closed the community" dynamic going on which is interesting. This fits in with some of the trends I observed at the Japanese multinational I worked in. I think there is also a relationship between the blogger's age and the need to communicate inside a community of friends, versus the need to create new dialogues with people outside your circle of friends.

I shall ponder this further on my LiveJournal blog - and then probably move it to Movable Type(!) because the lack of a site counter, trackback, archive and the offputting 'anonymous' or 'account holder ID' only choice for comments are all slowly driving me crazy!