Mathemagenic

It's true that weblogs make idea development visible, but there are other interesting things that are not blogged. For example, researchers rarely blog directly about their research (also reasons why, a bit more and not documenting, doing) and then become very surprised discovering research connections with people they read regularly.

Using weblog to capture ideas is different from documenting actions and announcing plans. So far weblogs provide very fuzzy views of our bigger canvas. This is good to find like-minded people, but not enough to turn ideas into actions.

For me it's still not very clear what do we need to do more things together. I guess that posting a bit more about our hidden agenda, future plans open for others to join, is a good start. So, here is an overview of my own plans...

My PhD research: studies I hope to do in 2004

• use of weblogs as personal knowledge repositories: how weblogs are used to capture and organise ideas (e.g. use of categories or keywords), how people deal with their own archives (come back or not, review on regular basis, search, reorganise)
• reading weblogs of others: why and how people read weblogs (see discussion as an example), what reading via RSS changes
• corporate weblogs in KM context

For all of these studies I'm open and very will to cooperate with others. Please, let me know if you are interested. Any suggestions of companies that could provide access to their internal weblogs and their authors are very welcome as well.

Weblog research networking

I feel quite stupid that many people doing weblog research do not really correlate their work: it would be much easier and more fun together. Things that I have in mind at this moment:

• get weblog research wiki going
• Sebastian Fiedler, Sebastien Paquet and me are thinking about writing/presenting together at conferences
  • next to BlogTalk we consider ED-MEDIA, ICALT and I-KNOW (especially Integration of Knowledge Management & (e)Learning track)
• next to it there is an idea of organising a series of f2f meetings/workshops/colloguia on "around weblogs" research in Europe (discussed a bit with Sebastian Fiedler and Thomas Burg)

I'm planning to blog/act on those things for some time already, but they get postponed as I have a lot of work to finish "end-of-the-year" tasks. Hope I'll do it coming month, but at least now you know my hidden agenda. If anything of this looks interesting enough to join, please let me know.

This post also appears on channel weblog research