65 Copyright © 2016, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 4 DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-0338-5.ch004 ABSTRACT This chapter applies the mechanisms of conversational humour to interactional processes in blogs. With blogs giving room for uninhibited personal and interactional publishing which create virtual commu- nities through written contributions that can best be regarded as conversations or “blogversations,” blogs are veritable sites for the investigation of conversational humour. Drawing its data from Linda Ikeji’s Blog, the chapter investigates how the blog author creates humorous keys to induce humorous turns from her readers and how the readers respond to and sustain the humour. The chapter also ex- amines how readers undermine the seriousness of posts lacking keyed humour by generating humour against author’s expectation. As humour occurs from both author’s and readers’ ends, it is established that conversational humour is a collaborative efort that strengthens social bonds and acts as a tool for sustaining entertainment and for motivating blog users to visit, to speak, to hear, and to be heard again. INTRODUCTION The weblog, that is “blog”, is a participatory media genre within the broader field of computer-mediated communication (CMC) which emerged in 1997 and has ever since been growing as a virtual medium for the production of diary-like texts on diverse topics of interest. The growth of the blog is especially “driven by the twin motors of free, user-friendly blogging applications such as Bloggers and LiveJournal and the global media exposure of A-list bloggers” (Hookway, 2008, p. 94). Generally speaking, “blogs are web pages in which dated entries appear in reverse chronological order so that the reader views the most recently written entries first” (Page, 2014, p. 42). In terms of texture, blogs may be multimodal Speaking in the Free Marketplace of Ideas: The Stylistics of Humour in “Blogversations” Bimbola Idowu-Faith Bowen University, Nigeria