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Mathemagenic ...giving birth to learning... |
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Mathemagenic
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 BlogDay 2005: emotional connection
I wasn't sure if linking to it was appropriate. Still the chronology of the events doesn't let me to separate my feelings about Badger's story and my thinking about 5 blogs to list for BlogDay2005: For one long moment on August 31st, bloggers from all over the world will post recommendations of 5 new Blogs, preferably Blogs that are different from their own culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, blog surfers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, unknown Blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers. Inevitably two themes blend in one - I'm thinking about the power of blogging to open a window in someone's life, to invite strangers, to share, to think, to celebrate and to be sad together... So I redefine the rules - the rest of my BlogDay 5 are about emotional connections as well... B2OB - Barriers and Opportunities to Organizational Blogging / Barreiras e Oportunidades Organizacionais ao Blogging
Time Goes By - What it's really like to get older
Conversations with Dina - Creative Chaos - Dina Mehta's Blog
I stop here and think of so many others I'd like to add to this post. I should do it more often - there is no need to wait for another BlogDay... More on: life
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Tuesday, August 30, 2005|
Experimenting with creating an ontology based on weblog content
Anjo documents the experiment of creating a cooking ontology by running smart tools through the content of Chocolate and Zucchini:
Curious to know what Sigmund would say :) More on: BlogTrace knowledge mapping ontologies
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Can I have tags instead of folders with my RSS feeds as well?
What I really want is RSS reader that would allow me tagging feeds - folders do not scale anymore :( May be it exists, but I'm suffering from not knowing - tell me then... And, since I'm here - my ideal feed reader would*:
* I'm using Bloglines now, so this refers to my experiences with it (= may be considered as "how to improve Bloglines" as well :) See also my posts and bookmarks on blog reading More on: blog reading RSS
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BlogWalk, BlogDay and Les Blogs
Blog-related events in my list... 31 August, blogosphere - BlogDay2005 (via Yigal Chamish) 2 September, Seattle - BlogWalk in Seattle: (un)conference? blogging?
5-6 December, Paris - Les Blogs 2.0
More on: BlogWalk
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Saturday, August 27, 2005|
Studying weblogs at Microsoft: start from Mini
If for whatever reasons you have to understand Microsoft culture start from reading Mini-Microsoft. I didn't know about it till someone mentioned it in one of the interviews I did with Microsoft bloggers, but since then it became a very useful resource to understand how things work inside the company. It's anonymous, sharp and full of love, frustration and desire for change. It's full of details, stories and great conversations in the comments - similar to those that you might hear if you manage to get in the right circles. For sure it's not objective, but it's a good way to start wondering about things and to know better how to ask questions... And - Mini - I wonder if there are chances I can interview you for the study I'm doing. Seriousely. I promise anonymity (and food of your choice if you care :). Email/Skype/(206)2346381. More on: Microsoft
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Just an observation
Necessary disclaimer before the rant: These are my words. I am not speaking for the 60,000 people at Microsoft. Please do not attribute my words to Microsoft, the MSN Spaces team, MSN, or any such thing. I work for Microsoft so that may be hard. But please try. More on: Microsoft
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Friday, August 26, 2005|
Digital work style: The new world of work (white paper)
Spent some time digging out MSFT white paper referred in one of internal presentation - funny enough I had to use a combination of intranet search and Google to find out the exact title, if it was public (yes) and exact location... I guess Microsoft could do a better job of publicising resources that suppose to influence customers' mindset :))) Anyway, the while paper - Digital Work Style: The New World of Work (.doc; 129KB) (see also: more explanations and related resources). [The reason I wanted to blog it: I think it outlines trends and scenarios of knowedge work (they talk about information work) in a pretty good way. I have to run now, but may come back later on today to added bullet-point summary for the paper.] On a side note - Microsoft Office people are doing some interesting things (as I could judge from the things I've seen on the walls in the bulding where some of them sit :), unfortunately they have many reasons not to blog about it... More on: papers personal knowledge management
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Tuesday, August 23, 2005|
Studying weblogs at Microsoft: a bit of my story
As I said earlier - I did an interview for MSR website, it comes as part of Microsoft Research Interns: Shared Experience, Unique Stories. Between other things I told the story of me getting into Microsoft (and, of course, blogging has a lot to do with it :) And talking about non-research Microsoft interns - you may want to check Channel 9 intern video and a videoclip by interns [first seen at Steven Sinofsky's Microsoft TechTalk]. More on: Microsoft
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Monday, August 22, 2005|
Link love: lists, clouds and action points
I was thinking of commenting on the unfolding discussion on link love since BlogHer, but couldn't find time to write it up properly (which for me required going through the fast-growing number of posts). Don't think I'll do it properly now, but given our work was referenced a couple of times I feel responsible enough to do it... I'm in the Feedster top 500 (as some friends nicely point out). So what?
These are my personal indicators that lists of popular blogs do not work. A few things could work. Smart combinations of blog metrics, or better visualizations of conversation clouds because I guess we are more interested in finding the cloudmakers and connecting with them...
Available for you and me. For our own weblogs or topics we are interested, not only for those researchers choose to study. Trusted and clickable. From what to how I'm not sure that the problem is in the lack of algorithms. At least those that come from research are published. I think it's pretty much about the teasing data. It's not enough to come up with a great formula. You have to test it - to see what comes out, to try it on different data sets, to implement it as a tool, to make tools open for a public, to make sure all these scales... But it starts with the data. And the data is not public. I can not speak for others, but I can talk about problems we have with the data needed for our research (which addresses some of the "link love" aspects). What we need to develop algorithms and tools are pretty simple: blog content in "full-text RSS quality" via APIs... We tried many of the current blog indexing tools: no luck (those that are pretty close to what we need, BlogPulse, Technorati and Bloglines are either consider the data they collect commercial or do not have APIs to access it). As a results Anjo is working on weblog spider instead of community discovery algorithm. I know other researchers working on weblog spidering instead of working on algorithms to process and visualise weblog data. I wonder how many other people out there who would play with the data if it would be accessible without any threshold. I believe there are many. I was very sad to hear last week that upflux didn't gain much support from players in the blog indexing market. I wonder if open access to weblog data is a "nice to have, but never real" dream. And I wonder if Mary's effort will turn it into reality... Btw, are there any Technorati tags for this conversation? |
Saturday, August 20, 2005|
Studying weblogs at Microsoft: connecting the dots
"Connecting the dots" is the biggest fun I have doing my study of weblogs at Microsoft... As an outsider I have the excuse of asking stupid questions and the value of insights coming from getting enculturated into local practices. As an insider (signed NDAs :) I have certain degree of trust and access to the information I wouldn't be able to reach otherwise. As a blogger I pay attention to the details. As a researcher I have time to go around and ask questions and I have an inclination to look how details fit into a bigger picture. With fun comes the responsibility. Sometimes I realise that having access to all bits and pieces, blog initiatives through the company and experiences of different people as well as time to study those I may discover things that nobody knows yet (at the end, this is what research is about :). I see how things happening in the different parts of the company are connected. I see people who may be much better knowing about each other. I hear about the events from the different sides. All that knowledge can be useful if it turns into action. And this is where the hard choices came into play again. Before coming to Microsoft I thought that my usual researcher vs. blogger problem wouldn't appear in this case. Since I'm not studying my own community I thought I could stay distant as an observer. It doesn't work. The first reason is that as an intern I'm part of the company, at least for the time being. So, I feel responsible for doing some good while I'm here. I'm also a blogger. It makes talking to other bloggers easier, but often it pushes me out of the "just observing" end because I have my own how do I blog over here? burning questions next to the pure research interests. Finally it's personality. I can't walk away silently knowing that I know something that could help people trying to solve a particular problem. Even if it means being a better researcher. So, I'm not a true observer - I contribute and often my contributions are results from having advantage of "connecting the dots" as a researcher. Once in a while I introduce people, suggest solutions or provide information that wouldn't be there without me. I also leak things that I probably shouldn't... All these make me more of a participant than observer and probably change things I'm studying. Bad on methodology side. But the same things open new doors, turn into trusted relations or give life to unexpected developments that help understanding blogging at Microsoft much better. You win some, you lose some... More on: blog research methodology Microsoft
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Friday, August 19, 2005|
The kindness of strangers
And while I'm trying to get somewhere else unknown glitches load Profgirrrrl in my browser. I scroll down and read this: Graduate school is a bleak time, both personally and financially, for many people. I can't even imagine being in graduate school and dealing with the added heartbreak and stress of a terminally ill spouse (cancer) with mounting medical bills and a health care system that is largely failing to cover those bills and keeps benefits that we all pay for like Social Security and Medicaid out of reach for 2 years (at which point the Medicaid is useless) because a grad student's salary is just a touch higher than the limit. I'm not kidding. I follow the link and the first post I read makes me going through archives and jumping over links and crying as I read about the fragility of life and the durability of stone and finding a call for action and getting my credit card out and thinking about the kindness of strangers as one more community indicator (also here)... May be it's only because cancer left scars in my own family, but I guess there is more to it. More on: blog communities life
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Preparing your armors?
Some Microsoft employees showed up at an Open Source event dressed as Darth Vader and a pair of Imperial StormTroopers. I can't say that I'm surprised. Working for Microsoft pretty much means that you learn to expect attacks on the company and even you as an individual. You either learn to live with it and see the humor or, well, I don't know what "or" is in this case. All the Microsoft employees I know seem to take this sort of thing in stride. Or at least if it does upset them they keep it under wraps. Those things should be hurting a lot... When I interview Microsoft bloggers many talk about their desire to show human faces behind the "evil empire" image. I thought that the "showing human face through blogging" was a corporate strategy, but, even if it is, behind it are the strong emotions of people working for the company. I was on another side of the fence, now I have an opportunity to be inside. Last week I was proof-reading my own story about doing internship at Microsoft Research (did an interview). I realised that I was very positive about my experiences here and I felt kind of guilty about it - as I had to explain how I actually could be happy working in this company... It's not the first time when I feel happy working for a company, but never before I felt the need to explain and excuse it. I wonder why I read Liz Lawley explaining why she wants MSN to succeed More on: blog research Microsoft
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Thursday, August 18, 2005|
Studying weblogs at Microsoft: sampling by location
After two weeks of interviewing I started to feel familiar and confident at Microsoft Campus at Redmond – knowing how much time is would take to one or another building, developing a classification of parking spaces, learning when it’s time to change lanes to take a turn and finding my own favorites (RedWest, without any doubt). Inside buildings it’s not that easy as well – most of them are not linear (hallo, semilattice :), so finding the right room may be a challenge. The indicators are not straightforward: you follow one that indicates the directions to the room you need to find out that the number is not on the next one. I’ve learnt not to panic and to follow the most obvious route instead – usually the right number appears on the next panel (after trial and error I found out that those routes are not the shortest, but at least they lead you where you want to go). Last week I caught myself feeling that I do something goof for the study each time I have an appointment in a building I haven't been before. I guess it has something to do with sampling – different building means someone from the group I haven't been talking before – more diversity... More on: blog research Microsoft
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Wednesday, August 17, 2005|
BlogHer aftermath: more on the speakers list
Nancy joins me in my uneasy feelings about the speakers list and teases out few more things in a conversation with Mary Hodder in the comments. I feel like adding to it... First the disclaimer: I believe that the initiative to get more new names known is a worthy one and I think Mary did a good job acting on it. I have my problems with it, but I don't have a better solution yet, so I'm trying to articulate what are the issues hoping that it would help working it out. I guess there are a couple of reasons why I'm uncomfortable with adding my name to the list:
I also have to add that for me the specific issue of the speakers lists is just an indication of the broader set of feelings and uncertainties that I can't describe well yet. Or it's a indication that I probably know my answer to my personal version Shelley Powers' questions - do I want to compete more? I feel that somehow all these is related to accomodating diversity and helping others to enter unknown worlds, we just have to figure out what the new rules of the game should be... BlogHer was a good model for that, a welcoming world where Every person I spoke with was someone who, under any other circumstance, I could spend hours with in delicious conversation. Ronni Bennett |
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The Robots and media contagion
Monday morning I didn't know that I'll spend the evening in a company of The Robots (the guys behind 43 Things, 43 Places and All Consuming) and Lee LeFever welcoming Cameron Marlow who happen to be in Seattle with beers and fun. Between other things we had a nice presentation of Cameron's dissertation research (photos by Daniel Spils and Erik Benson), talked about blogs and dreams and all other 43 things... Cameron's dissertation (The structural determinants of media contagion) should be online soon - there is a lot of good stuff in there... A few things to remember:
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Monday, August 15, 2005|
BlogHer aftermath
I haven't been blogging for a while… In the middle of BlogHer something happened to the computer at home that runs Radio and the one who could fix it has left the house to see me in Seattle. After "BlogHer" I desperately wanted to blog, but somehow I never able to write knowing that it wouldn't be posted anywhere soon, so you’ll have to read the stories of others (or, start with a summary by Julie Leung). Strong feelings: ...Talking with a couple of bloggers about reading private blogs of their teenage kids – something different and strange and ethically unresolved for myself. ...Mena Trott, sitting alone in an empty lobby – just a girl at a conference – so different from the celebrity appearance last year at BlogTalk... ...Sitting on the floor at identity blogging session (Nancy's notes), too low to see the speakers – just listening, being hit by their stories of revealing themselves online and thinking about all those parallels to vulnerable writing is ethnography... ...Growing discomfort with the discussions about linking and power, realizing that I don’t like female A-listers and the tipping point of it – strange inner resistance of adding my name to the speakers list started by Mary Hodder with the idea to make female speakers more visible. Next year: go if you have a chance (regardless of your gender) or sponsor a blogger next to you. More on: BlogHer
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© Copyright 2002-2005 Lilia Efimova 
This weblog is my learning diary. Sometimes I write about things related to my work, but the views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
Last update: 8/31/2005; 11:25:30 AM.
