Blogging conventions

What do these readings suggest about the rhetorical conventions expected and/or accepted in the blogging discourse community?

To me, the most interesting about the blogging community is that even in a forum where anonymity is revered there are rules to which members adhere. Although the establishment of conventions within the blogosphere should not surprise me, I found after the readings that in the seemingly chaotic milieu of any internet environment, bloggers have established a high degree of order.
First, there is a well-established lexicon that bloggers use as part of a very large discourse community. My personal favorite term, one that reminded me of some of my more ideological friends, was barking moonbat. There seems to be a convivial nature to the terminology, which allows bloggers to be critical of those within the community without being overtly offensive. Second, bloggers have a very clear way in which they cite sources. In Blogging for Dummies, Brad Hill notes that the preferred practice is to cite sources using the url, as opposed to using the academically complicated practice of citing an entire source within and at the end of a text. Although it could be argued that this is to lax of a genre convention, it has a two-fold benefit. It requires that the reader of the blog peruse an entire source to find the referred to information, and it enables the blogger to produce and disseminate a continuous stream of thought as they write. Blogs are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, dynamic and immediate. This citation convention makes for quick dissemination of information.
Although not exactly part of the blogging conventions, one thing I would like to note is Hill’s reference to blogging consequence. In a medium that celebrates anonymity, firings due to bloggers writing about on-the-job practices is becomingly increasingly more common. This raises the questions of violations of free speech and rights to privacy. Do they apply in personal web spaces?