13:51 11/06/2004
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Mathemagenic
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This is a note to myself (because I woke up thinking :); to be expanded later. Weblog research challenges:
This post also appears on channel weblog research More on: blog research
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As the title says - I'm going to cross Atlantic and be in US in January (fingers crossed: still have to get a visa). The first part of the travel plan is more or less clear:
The second part is quite open. I'd like to stop over at 1-2 places in US mainland on my way back home to meet interesting people. I have no particular preferences for places, but some ideas for what I'd like to do there:
So, any options/suggestions/invitations are welcome... I'd prefer to go somewhere where I can do interesting things with interesting people. Also it shouldn't ruin my budget, so I'd prefer somewhere relatively easy to get and relatively cheap to stay (or with local hosts who like strangers around :) This post also appears on channel BlogWalk |
Bottom-up phenomena has accelerated in recent years because of social software. A relatively simple decentralized pattern of enabling more connections and groups to form has complex results. These results (for example: open source, the long tail, heterarchical organization, emergent democracy, wikipedia and participatory media) hold great promise. Bottom-up production is driven by social incentives, comes at a lower cost, realizes economies of speed and enhances quality through diverse and greater participation. Despite these benefits, Bottom-up phenomena is perceived as a significant risk because the dynamic of control is uncertain. But every risk has its rewards and can be managed if known. Looking back now I realised what got me into doing my PhD at the first place - fascination with formal/informal interplay in learning... Where the bottom-up and top-down meet. Middlespace. Taking control over your life and leadership as releasing energy of others. I remember the feeling that got me there, instant knowing that I found something that could keep me focused for four years of PhD and probably longer... I moved beyond looking for synergies between formal and informal learning, but I'm still there, fascinated by playing with forces in a middlespace. More on: learning informal middlespace passion PhD
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I shouldn't be quoting that much, but I guess you can forgive someone with a trojan flu for lack of summarisation :) In a great post, Metadata for the masses (via Many-to-Many), Peter Merholz advocates free tagging of documents as opposed to choosing tags from inflexible top-down classification systems, which often force users to view the world in potentially unfamiliar ways. I tend to agree with that from my experience of taxonomies, which often become obsolete within two years. Then Peter writes about the limitations of free tagging:Clearly, such tagging systems are not a panacea; they present many potential drawbacks. With no one controlling the vocabulary, users develop multiple terms for identical concepts. For example, if you want to find all references to New York City on Del.icio.us, you'll have to look through "nyc," "newyork," and "newyorkcity." I have mixed feelings about ontologies... From one side, they could be really useful. Next to connecting metadata from different people or communities ontologies could be used to connect data from different systems (e.g. your weblog and del.icio.us tags). And, of course, one could imagine all kinds of great things with inference rules (always wonder if I picked up the right meaning of the term from my colleagues ;). From another side, ontology development could be complex and costly, so I'm always wondering if it's worth it. This doesn't mean that we can't think of ways to support converging metadata and emerging ontologies. Converging metadata could be a result of social pressure. It can be done as in k-collector where people can select from the list of existing topics (their own and others) or add their own. Or as in nutr.itio.us by choosing del.icio.us tags of others for a link you are about to add. This approach can help cases like nyc/newyork/newyorkcity, where we deal with different ways of writing the same tag. For example, after finding out that majority of del.icio.us users used visualization and not visualisation I changed s into z in my own tags. Next to it we can think of emergent ontologies. Ages ago Liz Lawley described how relations you can do it with del.icio.us: Add a site to your del.icio.us bookmarks, and then look to see who else has added it. What descriptive tags did they use for it? As an example, here are the current links to Metacrap in the del.icio.us system. I used the terms metadata and semweb. Other terms used include taxonomy, ontology, ia, humanFactor, and xml. Funny enough, del.icio.us does it now automatically, but you can see it only for some posts, so I was surprised by the discovery. So, check my links on aggregation, middle column, lower part - it shows other users who bookmarked same links and tags they used (rss, tool_rss, feed, meta, syndication, atom). Of course, you need a critical mass of tagged links to do it and, of course, quality varies, but just think how much you can do with something like this. For example:
Side note: as an alternative to folksonomies, from Peter Merholz Ethnoclassification, to the best of my knowledge, was coined by Susan Leigh Star for her Digital Libraries conference workshop "Slouching Toward Infrastructure." See also:
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One more instance of dreams coming true :) KnowledgeBoard workshop at KM Europe: Personal KM? In spite of KM's evolution as a field, a key question remains unresolved: 'How do we improve knowledge workers' productivity?' So, you are very welcome to join us on 9 November, 15:00-18:00 (and make sure you are there for dinner after it :) Two places to contribute:
I'll post more details soon. Email or Skype me if you have burning questions... And, if you don't want to miss others at KM Europe (last year's sad story), add your name and details to People at KM Europe page. This post appears on channels KM Europe, knowledge management |
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This flu is like a trojan on your computer - everything still works, but slow and strangely, you try to figure out what is wrong and try catching the intruder, but fighting it is not easy... Trying to let my body to get into the flu fully, so it can fight and recover; working at home - fun and lots of things done; talking, reading, movies... Feel really strange... Anyway, this flu associates strangely with a few lines from Leonard Cohen spotted at Dina's blog: Ring the bells that still can ring, |
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I read 200+ weblogs and thought that it would be a good idea to share my subscriptions with others. As I wrote earlier I'm not comfortable making my Bloglines subscriptions public and anyway a list of weblogs I read doesn't say much about why I read them. So I came up with a better idea. Inspired by The Friday Five that proposes 5 questions to answer every Friday I thought of sharing 5 weblogs from my reading list every Friday. And I thought that it would be nice to have them linked by a common theme. So, I start today from list of bloggers that I'd "know" from their weblogs and I'd love to meet face-to-face:
Of course, there are many other bloggers I want to meet, but I had to start somewhere :) More on: blog networking blog reading my Friday 5
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Technical weblog research question: I have a list of links and I'd like to find out which of them lead to weblogs. Is there a way of doing this automatically? Things that I thought about:
Do you have any suggestions? This post also appears on channel weblog research More on: blog research
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In case you see me online at Skype and try to call, but I'm not answering:
So, if you are calling me on Skype and I'm not answering while you see that I'm online, please email me or drop an instant messaging note (I'm on MSN most of the time, on Yahoo & AIM occasionally, nicknames via email). And - as there is no way to synchronise Skype contact lists as well, please, forgive me if I ask for authorisation for the second time :) More on: IM
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Tom Erickson in 1995 essay Work and Spirit: It's popular to talk about the boundaries between work and leisure getting increasingly fuzzy. But for me, until I began working at home, it felt more like work was seeping into my leisure and home time, and that the non-work aspects of life were shrinking. Technology has made it easy for work-life to follow us home, but not as easy for home-life to follow us to work. Only now that I work at home, do I find that there is a better feeling of balance between the two. This beautifully written essay (wonder is it Tom's research or writing that is turning me into his fan ;) gets me thinking again on turning work into life - may be bringing Home or "personal" is one of the missing ingridients? Some time back I wrote in personal KM Q&A about my views on future developments in PKM (bold is added now):
May be this last point is more important than I thought: knowing what is "life" for you and making sure that it has place at your workplace. I guess it's the whole art of choosing and shaping your work to make you happy... I'm still learning it, but this is my main working rule so far:
As an example - me, a year ago, on changed PhD focus:
Having some victories makes ongoing battles easier :) |
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Voida, A., Mynatt, E.D., Erickson, T., & Kellogg, W.A. (2004). Interviewing over instant messaging. In extended abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2004). Vienna, Austria, April 24-29. New York: ACM Press, pp. 1344-1347. (If you don't have full-text access to ACM, you can get .pdf here or here) Abstract. Interviews are a cornerstone of human-computer interaction research. As a research method, they can both be deeply valuable and distinctly challenging. Pragmatic challenges of interviews include the travel that may be required to meet face-to-face with a respondent or the time necessary to transcribe the exchange. As a tool for conducting interviews, instant messaging presents some compelling potential benefits to mitigate challenges such as these. And yet, over the medium of instant messaging, the genre of the interview takes on a different character. Drawing from our experiences conducting interviews over instant messaging, we reflect on the implications of using this new medium for conducting interviews. It's just 4 pages, so I'm too lazy to summarise... I'm really thinking of doing IM interviews for my PhD research. Any experiences I should take into account? More on: IM methodology PhD
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Tom Coates on tag-based bookmarks in browsers (via Brian Dennis) - applying del.icio.us tag-bookmarking model to a browser: To summarise the problems with current bookmarking systems then, we could say that (1) the process is slow and annoying (2) that it requires us to continually refine and redevelop our taxonomies if we're going to keep track of everything, (3) that URLs can belong in a number of bins and that (4) we can be left with unmanageably large lists. An ideal system would therefore speed the process up of both bookmarking a site and retrieving it later. An ideal system would try to alleviate the problems of categorisation and would work as an a priori assumption that a URL might wish to be stored in multiple bins. An ideal system would not display all the links by default. An ideal system would, in fact, use tags... Tom provides a whole scenario and mock-ups of tag-based bookmarks in a browers... What I'd add is that we need to think broader than easy classification, bookmarking and finding. The study I blogged almost a year ago (Keeping found things found on the web) suggest that when deciding what to do with interesting web-pages people may think about:
From this perspective del.icio.us would be more powerful than tagged bookmarks in a browser :) And, have no idea how I missed folksonomy as a new term for it :) See also (re: more things to do with tags): LiveTopics wishlist or topic-based blogging support More on: del.icio.us knowledge mapping ontologies
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Carolyn Wei (2004). Formation of Norms in a Blog Community. In Laura Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff and Jessica Reyman (ed): Into the Blogosphere; Rhetoric, Community and Culture of Weblogs, University of Minnesota. (other papers) The purpose of the study is to identify common themes, behaviors, and practices with respect to content and site design within this community of knitting bloggers and to examine the formation of these norms, particularly in relation to the community’s stated rules. The study:
It's an interesting paper, especially given that it describes specific weblog subculture: Like many other online communities, the Knitting Bloggers embody a distinctive culture, where members are often passionate about knitting and are excited about getting to know like-minded people either through personal interactions or through the words on a blog. Relationships between the knitting bloggers can move fluidly online and offline. Some bloggers regularly get together in real space to participate in "stitch 'n' bitches" (informal knitting and gossip parties) or go to yarn stores. Group activities may also be carried out online. One interesting tradition is the "knit-along" where a group of people knit from the same pattern, such as for slippers or a sweater, and blog their progress. Often, one of the knit-along bloggers will post pictures of the participants’ finished items as they complete the knit-along. The unique culture of knitters who blog likely contributes to some of the behaviors observed in member sites. As Jan Schmidt already commented the paper doesn't really look at formation of norms, but rather at actual practices compared with norms stated in Knitting Bloggers NetRing membership guidelines (e.g. writing about knitting or displaying web ring code). I'm more interested in emergent norms (Jan also suggests a need for classifying norms), e.g. common knitting weblog features: Some features on the knitting blogs are unique to the knitting genre. One convention is to track progress on knitting projects or to show off completed works. Over 57% of the bloggers tracked their "Works in Progress" or the items that they are currently knitting. These were directly listed or were linked on the home page. Over half of the blogs also kept lists or photo galleries of their completed works. Another popular practice was to keep a separate list of links to favorite knitting blogs in a side bar, without commingling them with links to other kinds of sites: over 60% of sites linked to other knitting blogs in this manner, suggesting Knitting Bloggers spend time visiting other blogs in their community. These simple normative practices help knitting blogs develop a distinctive flavor, one that allows visitors to see that the blogs are knitting blogs even if the posts are not exclusively about knitting. The way Carolyn defines a community membership (those who are members of Knitting Bloggers NetRing) is an interesting one:
On membership in multiple communities (defined as belonging to multiple knitting rings): Membership in multiple web rings leads to a question for future research: how do blogs adhere to norms and rules for multiple blog communities? Granted, there is much overlap of interest and probably practice between these knitting blog communities, but when differences exist between them, how does a blogger resolve them? On studying own community (re: my own approach): ...it was discovered that prior immersion in Knitting Bloggers was extremely useful in certain situations. For example, it may be difficult to distinguish between a personal knitting project and a group knit-along project without prior knowledge. Much of the writing in a blog is in shorthand, and it can be difficult to detect the whole story behind the blog by looking only at a month-long block of posts. For example, a blog author might fully describe embarking on a knit-along glove project and refer to it subsequently without mentioning the knit-along. Without prior knowledge, a coder may not be able to tell the difference. This post also appears on channel weblog research More on: blog communities blog research papers
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Today is the last day to nominate weblogs for Best of the Blog award. Although I can think about many really good weblogs, I nominated only two... Both weblogs are Russian, both are powered by LiveJournal (which is most popular blogging platform in Russia) and both are examples of "more than a weblog"...
This journal gives voices to buildings - those that do not exist any more tell their stories and those that are threathened cry for help - so more people hear those voices and then words are turning into actions that help to save some buildings... For me this is one of the most powerful examples of "weblog activism".
Most of stories are written by people of my generation, telling stories of their grandparents. The stories are very different, but all make that war very personal and very close... And, between other stories I found a story from memories of Michail Katukov, which added another dimention to the street named after him where I lived for almost 20 years... It's pity that most of you don't read Russian - these two are powerful examples of what weblogs could do... More on: actionable sense
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Something to read over the weekend: Public Displays of Connection by Judith Donath and danah boyd in BT Technology Journal (thank to danah for sharing): Abstract. Participants in social network sites create self-descriptive profiles that include their links to other members, creating a visible network of connections — the ostensible purpose of these sites is to use this network to make friends, dates, and business connections. In this paper we explore the social implications of the public display of one’s social network. Why do people display their social connections in everyday life, and why do they do so in these networking sites? What do people learn about another’s identity through the signal of network display? How does this display facilitate connections, and how does it change the costs and benefits of making and brokering such connections compared to traditional means? The paper includes several design recommendations for future networking sites. I may come back to this post and add notes... |
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Google does great things, but it asks for your data in return. It says no evil... Of course, you don't have to sell your soul at once, it just will take it in pieces - find what you need on the web, get paid with AdSense, connect at Orkut, email at Gmail, share your ideas at Blogger , organise your photos with Picasa, and now also search your search your desktop - and pay with your data every time you do so. It knows the tricks well: useful tools are difficult to resist and you don't mind to pay a bit in return (I use Gmail knowing how creepy it is - it makes life so much easier). Selling pieces of your invisible other self seems to be safe and it's so easy to forget how easy pieces of data could be connected. Anyway, I wonder if there is another future... We are getting more and more connected, we want more and more integration and transparency, so may be letting our data go is just the price we have to pay? May be the only choices we have is to whom we sell pieces of our souls and how much we get in return? Sharing your desktop with your Orkut friends anyone? More on: knowledge mapping transparency
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I believe that the best thing that could happen to a book is to be read, so my books always travel across homes of my friends (and sometimes forget to come back :).
The '3 Rs' of BookCrossing...I'm going to move to another house soon, so I guess it's a good occasion for some of my books starting their travel in the wild. Usually I prepare for a travel far in advance, so I'm going through BookCrossing release techniques forum trying to figure out what would be a good place to release my books... I'd appreciate if you can share some experiences in case you have them. Next to releasing books once in a while, one can also start a BookCrossing Zone somewhere in a place with regular releases of books. When reading about it I've got an idea - why BookCrossing Zone should be located in a place, why not mobile? So, what do you think about Mobile BookCrossing Zone? Something like:
Wondering if something like that would work... May be we should try at next BlogWalk :) More on: BookCrossing
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Richard MacManus on changes in Bloglines subsriptions in 3 months: Remember my post 3 months ago that analysed Bloglines subscriber stats? Well I thought I'd review the numbers. You can blame Seb Paquet for this ;-) Why? Because he's just posted something on his weblog for the first time in over 3 months, which got me thinking about how his time away from blogging affected his stats. It turns out his Bloglines subscriber numbers have increased by 25% over the last 3 months, despite him not posting a single new entry! A similar story for Mark Pilgrim, who has all but turned his back on blogging - yet his stats are up 31%. My subscriptions are 15% higher (compare with Richard's own 78% growth and check absolute numbers as well)... Read the rest for more statistics and discussion... My two cents: 1. As I wrote before, I'm a bit scared about my own high numbers. Mainly because I can't return the favour (with my 200+ subscribtions I'm on the edge of what I can handle), so it makes me feel blogging more like broadcasting than a conversation, which I want it to be. 2. I keep wondering how many "dead" subscriptions are there? In a world of news aggregators Bloglines is similar to Blogger in the world of blogging - free, easy to try introduction platform that many play with and then decide that it's not for them or move somewhere else. So I wonder how many abandoned Bloglines subscriptions are there... Btw, if you are not reading Richard's blog you should give it a try (only be prepared for long, well-researched and well-crafted posts :) More on: blog reading blogging conversations
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One of the directions that keep on popping up when I'm thinking about blogging in KM context is topic-based blogging. There are a couple of reasons behind it:
liveTopics and k-collector are good examples of personal vs. corporate implementations (see also: liveTopics and k-collector compared) and del.icio.us is an example of connecting personal and shared views on topics together. In this post I'd like to focus on personal side and describe what topic-based blogging functionalities one may want as a blogger. And because I'm very practical and selfish I'd describe it as my liveTopics wishlist :) What liveTopics do now
My liveTopics wishlist
Of course, I wonder how many of those things are "nice to have"/"Lilia specific" and which features would be used by many blogger, but this is a "further research direction" as I'd write in a paper :) |
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I'm not a big fun of joining YASNs just for the sake of it, but my discovery of Plazes has a little story behind it. I guess I heard about it first in a conversation about geotagging weblogs between Martin and Rick. Then I've got an invitation from Matt, registered, but was too lazy to install Plazes launcher that you need to make it work. Then the story took a funny twist. I was looking for a WiFi in Florence, found Ben's office at Plazes and as a results of some out-of-the-blue emailing had a pleasure of meeting Ben Hammersley. Today, reading about social networking and logging physical proximity in a paper by my colleague I thought of it and decided to give it a try. I guess my adoption process took around 1 month, so I wonder if I'd qualify as an early adopter :) Anyway, I'm there now:
Once you are online and logged in Plazes show your location and allow you to see where are others. I guess it's interesting in several cases:
I added it to my homepage and will see how it works... So far I added it to my home page. Not sure if I'll keep it there as it seems to make loading a bit slower (have to check it) and shows me plazeless from time to time. Anyway, it's still beta, so hopefully it will improve. Features I'd love to see in the future:
More on: location networking technology adoption YASN
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Talking with Rick about masks, roles and theater and reading Torill's dissertation (Pleasures of the Player: Flow and Control in Online Games, 1,6MB pdf) connected when I realised that I do not really enjoy role playing while I like playing with my multiple identities. Drawing the line between these two is not easy, but so far I think about multiple identities as different sides of myself and about role-playing as taking a role of someone who is not me (elf assassin for example :). Need to dig into theory to get it clear... More on: identity
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Was thinking what defines a vacation... Some may think that I spoiled my little vacation by doing work-related stuff - reading papers as well as talking about weblogs and geeky things with Ben Hammersley, Riccardo Cambiassi, Mark Rendeiro and some blogless people - but I still feel that this was a vacation and not work. So I came with a definition:
It worked pretty much that way (apart from waking up at 6:30 today in the morning to catch a train :) More on: no work-life balance
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A few strange days. Travelling, relaxed, beauty of Florence, wine tasting, great conversations with people I just met, good food, some geeky talks, sunshine, walking around... Feels so strange getting online after a few hours walking in Assisi, being silent, soaking into the atmoshpere of old walls, stories about saints' lifes, more stories on walls of cathedrals, without beginning and without an end, more sunshine... Was sitting on a wall watching sun going down the valley and reading a book I picked up in a random bookstore in Florence, Sold. It's about a story of Zana Muhsen, a girl raised in UK and sold into a marriage into Yemen by her Yemeni father at the age of sixteen. It's about faith and fight, loosing and finding hope, as well as about differences between cultures that may be just a few hours flying in between. Being surrounded by medieval walls made the story of learning to live in a stone house more real, made me feeling how fragile is what we have now and take for granted... Anyway, time to get some food. Hopefully I can find some grapes to fit old pecorino of unknown variety that tastes so good. It's may be a good alternative to eating in a place full of tourists :) Thanks to everyone for the birthday greetings. I'll be back to email in a couple of days. More on: cross-cultural life travel
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Last two years I spent my birthday hard working. I thought I should do it differently this time, so I booked a ticket. I'm flying to Pisa, then take train to Florence and then I'll see how it goes before my flight back on Monday :) I also thought that my weblog makes an impression that I'm more serious than I really am, and, as birthday party is a good opportunity to know someone better, I decided to write 100 things about me. Not sure if it will help you to know me better, but at least I had fun writing it :) More on: life
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Just a quick recap of some ideas from today's internal presentation on RSS... Questions people ask
Lessons learnt
More general considerations when you think about RSS uses in a company (with additions of insights from "around BlogWalk" talks in London)
Introduction trajectory (just thinking aloud here)
This post also appears on channel BlogWalk More on: blogs in business RSS technology adoption
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If you happen to come across my older post Finding blogs linking to a specific blog post: test results you know that so far "Blogines" seem to be the best solution. Just a bit after my experiment Seb developed Bloglines citation bookmarklet that allows you to see Bloglines citations for a page you are browsing. Since then I was thinking of a macro that would do something similar to Technorati Cosmos macro, but for Bloglines. Now I'm happy :) Matt Mower has developed Bloglines citation macro for Radio. Add it your item template and it will add a link to Bloglines citations for each of your posts showing posts from other weblogs linking to it. I guess this explanation is quite confusing, so just go to Matt's post, click to "links from other weblogs" and you'll see how it works. And, if your blog runs on Movable Type, you can make your readers happy as well with BlogLines Citations Movable Type plugin by Riccardo Cambiassi. It shouldn't be difficult to do for other weblog tools as well, so I hope that something like this would be there soon. Why do I care? Because for me blogging is about conversations and knowing who links to your posts makes conversations possible (and I even wrote a paper saying this :) And, in case Mark Fletcher reads this post, having Bloglines citations as RSS feed is the next thing that would make me happy ;))) More on: better blogging blogging conversations Radio
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After travelling its Netherlands - Germany - Austria - UK root BlogWalk is coming to Sweden. So, BlogWalk 5.0:
This BlogWalk is a bit different from others.
As usual, it's by invitation only, but if you know why you should be there let us know. BlogWalks are open for new people, but we need to know who will be coming and why to keep the conversations meaningful. Update: more details by Ton and BlogWalk wiki. This post also appears on channel BlogWalk More on: BlogWalk
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People may think that I'm blog addict when I talk about my blogging experiences. Wouldn't judge the addiction part, but I can't be not enthusiastic if I have experiences like those of last few days... Last week I had a crazy idea of finishing a paper earlier than expected... It was pretty close to the deadline, so I wasn't sure if I can ask someone at work... I could see booked schedules, but it was also about cultural norms - you don't pop up with a request to do something on a short notice in a Dutch "plan everything ages in advance" culture and you don't ask people who think about work-life balance differently from you to review something on Friday afternoon (which, of course, ended up to be a Friday evening :) It was also about the state of the paper. I had lots of discussions with colleagues (should ask if they want their names here :) on the earlier versions of the paper and was in a middle of reworking it... What I needed most on Friday was a "fresh eye" view on it as well as English check :) So after hesitating |