Mathemagenic

Just experienced nice example of backchanneling in blogging. The story:

Robert on Friday

Today I had an interesting discussion with my roommate at work about the blogging phenomenon and particularly about the reasons why people blog. Maybe since our building is crowded with bloggers today ;-)
Anyway, I stumbled upon the unpublished paper "I'm Blogging This", by Bonnie Nardi, Diane Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht and Luke Swartz. Nice paper, from experienced CSCW researchers, which discusses various reasons why "ordinary bloggers" blog.

Carla today:

Robert posted a link to a very interesting paper from Bonnie Nardi, Diana Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht and Luke Swartz, called "I'm blogging this", A closer look at why people blog (submitted to Communications of the ACM).
I'm going to read it instantly!

I have both weblogs in my news aggregator, but if you think that I found the paper via it you are wrong: I saw it on Carla's table :)

Hope you guessed that this was a way to introduce the paper well worth reading :)))

Btw, Robert Slagter is another colleague, blogging about tailorable software. He is trying to find blogs on groupware and groupware design, so let him know if you know any.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Just thought I would share a piece from the previous post paper (p.9):

In a simplest case, a weblog post is embedded into "a conversation with self", a personal narrative used to articulate and to organise his own thinking. A single blogger could have several of such conversations simultaneously, returning to ideas over time. In a weblog this is usually visible as linking to one's earlier posts, use of related titles, or organising ideas using different categories or topics. At the same time a weblog post can trigger (or be a response to) a conversation with others, sometimes leading to several independent conversations happen simultaneously.

The interplay between personal and public, individual and community, is something that makes weblogs interesting to study... In the same line of thinking (Learning webs, p.4):

Synergies of self-organised and community learning. A weblog provides its author with personal space for learning that does not impose a communal learning agenda and learning style. At the same time learners are not alienated and can benefit from a community feedback, validation and further development of ideas.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

To continue weblog conversations and follow-up discussion: working report An argumentation analysis of weblog conversations by Aldo de Moor and me.

Weblogs are important new components of the Internet. They provide individual users with an easy way to publish online and others to comment on these views. Furthermore, there is a suite of secondary applications that allow weblogs to be linked, searched, and navigated. Although originally intended for individual use, in practice weblogs increasingly appear to facilitate distributed conversations. This could have important implications for using this technology as a medium for collaboration. Given the special characteristics of weblogs and their supporting applications, they may be well suited for particular conversational purposes, requiring different forms of argumentation. In this paper, we analyze the argumentation potential of weblog technologies using a diagnostic framework for argumentation technologies. We pay special attention to the conversation structures and dynamics that weblogs naturally afford. Based on this initial analysis, we make a number of recommendations for research on how to apply these technologies in purposeful conversation processes such as for knowledge management.

In this paper we analyse actionable sense conversation. It's a bit shallow (we took one week only and didn't follow several interesting lines), but we are working on a proper analysis and better connections with innovation/KM theme. Comments are welcome.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Just realised that I have two more thinking themes from BlogWalk:

Roles, interplay and affordances of physical and digital artefacts in thinking and communication. This is not a very new one - I have been touching it while thinking about connections between information and knowledge, knowledge traces we leave and apprenticeship... As an illustration - a piece from my paper on knowledge work model (p.13):

...developing knowledge requires filtering vast amounts of information, making sense of it, connecting different bits and pieces to come up with new ideas. In this process physical and digital artefacts play an important role (Kidd, 1994; Sellen & Harper, 2001; Halverson, 2004), so knowledge workers are faced with a need for personal information management to organise their paper and digital archives, e-mails or bookmark collections.

BlogWalk observations and discussions made this theme deeper - thinking of post-it idea aggregators, affordances of digital photography and connections between physical and digital objects.

The second theme is more of a question: what invisible blogging audience does to us? There is something very strange in public blogging where just the probability of someone reading your words changes usual habits and practices... Trying to understand writing for the mix of known audience (explicit subscribers and usual commenters) and invisible "the world" audience is fascinating...

This post also appears on channels BlogWalk and weblog research

I'm getting ready for a few weeks of travel. If you happen to be at one of these places let me know   - I would love to meet.

23.03-30.03 Lisbon, Portugal - first at WBC04 (presenting Learning webs: Learning in weblog networks on 26.03 around 15:30 according to the program) then sightseeing around (suggestions are welcome!)

31.03-5.04 Innsbruck, Austria - at OKLC04 (presenting my PhD research during PhD workshop on 1.04 and Discovering the iceberg of knowledge work: A weblog case on one of the days after). I'll be travelling via Munich, so may be there on 4-5.04, but it's still open.

9.04-19.04 Moscow, Russia - can't resist cheap tickets :)