Mathemagenic

While I didn’t blogged, I read weblogs. Big share of those are on parenting-related themes. One of the trends that I was surprised to see is how many of those are into “pro-blogging” - blogging not only for the fun of it, but also for some business-related purposes (some links are here).

This seems to the case for “weblogs in general” too - I come across more and more advice on pro-blogging. Reading it I realise how much what I do with my weblog is guided by other choices and principles: I prefer not to define goals and strategies for blogging and while I’m glad to have readers, I do not spend much time putting on paper who is my audience and how exactly my weblog will make it happy.

And, on the top of it, I get annoyed when blogging is conceptualised primarily as a medium for public communication (especially with microphones or megaphones as a visual metaphor ;). So, working on a PhD chapter that describes my own blogging practices, I wanted to show the other side of it - blogging for myself. Below is a slightly edited piece from the current draft.

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Blogging is frequently viewed as a medium for public communication: it is reasonable to assume that those who do not want their words to be read by a broad audience would use another medium. However, while the need to communicate is a part of blogging, it is not necessary the primarily reason for it.

In my case blogging grew out of a need for a place to organise my thinking and exploration; the readers, as well as writing for them, appeared later. While the public nature of blogging was the factor I took into account from the beginning of it, the primary force that shaped it was its usefulness for myself.

In the process of balancing my own needs and interests with those of my potential readers when blogging I often make choices to serve my own interests first. Those choices shaped my blogging practices in multiple ways.

Work-in-progress instead of polished pieces. Although a weblog readers are more likely to benefit from well-thought and carefully crafted posts, my need for capturing ideas at their early stages resulted in writing quick work-in-progress memos. Using weblog for a quick documentation, often squeezed between working on other task also resulted in writing many relatively short posts, connected by links. While it provides a trail of connected ideas that works for my own purposes, it is more difficult to follow and to make sense of for a reader, who could probably benefit more from reading a longer entry that would connect several linked posts into a coherent whole.

Fragmented weblog focus. When started, my weblog was focused primarily on the topics related to learning and knowledge management. Over time my writing shifted to other topics, potentially alienating loyal readers. While I was “not sure that reading all methodology ‘thinking aloud’ is that fun” (quoted from this post) it was essential for my learning process, so it became relatively big part of the weblog content. Currently, the content of my weblog is pretty fragmented as it reflects the change of my interests and topics I worked on over time.

“Selfish” tagging. Another dimension where the choices between my own interests and those of an external audience appeared was using tags for organising my own posts. While I had multiple opportunities to use tags that would help users of external systems to find relevant entries in my weblog, I haven’t used them since this would mean losing personally meaningful tag-based navigation in my weblog. The choice of terms to use as tags is also influenced primarily by their relevance for my own thinking practice.

The reasons for choosing to serve my own needs before those of my audience are twofold:

• Serving the needs of others might make blogging meaningless for myself. For example, writing only on a narrow set of topics in the weblog defeats the initial purpose of blogging to collect in one place fragmented bits relevant to my thinking.
• In my case too much dependence on the audience is proved to be paralysing: I would spend too much time trying to figure out for whom exactly to write and what their needs might be (a bit more on writing for non-existing audience). Also, non-intrusive nature of blogging (e.g. compared to the email that is delivered to the mailboxes) means that there is no necessarily an audience for a specific post, so writing to serve others in this case feels similar to giving a presentation in an empty room.

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Other bloggers on related issues:

• Don’t Tell Me How To Blog
• Your Blog Archives: To Cull or Not to Cull?
• The luxury of pupose-less blogging can be a good thing

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Just realised that it’s been 6 years of blogging. Last Saturday. I didn’t even think of it.

I guess it’s called growing up - similar to the moment when your birthdays are not that important any more and you have to do a little calculation to figure out what to say when someone asks about your age :)

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I did an internal talk today, trying to put in a coherent story some results from two studies and emergent ideas about conclusions for my dissertation. I’m not extremely happy with what came out of it, but in case someone wants it - it’s at Slideshare.

Some comments on the stuff covered:

• Study 1 is an analysis of my own blogging practices as related to the development of ideas for the PhD dissertation. It’s an autoethnography that uses my weblog as an input to reconstruct my uses of weblog as a personal knowledge base and as a tool to support process of idea development from early stages to final products. Lots of unsorted background reading is in PhD/Chapter 3 category.
• Study 2 is an analysis of 6320 posts of 34 KM blogs in 2004. The visuals don’t make that much sense without an explanation, which is too complicated to write here. Some background is at:
  • Weblog conversations revisited: an introduction
  • Weblog conversations revisited: is there more than one?
  • Weblog conversations revisited: conversations with self
  • Weblog conversations revisited: conversations with self vs. conversations with others
  • Weblog conversations: the big one
• The last part is an attempt to use ideas from the research about the conditions for emergent social processes in cities (background reading) to explain how satisfying personal interests results in social effects in the case of weblogs and other tools.

Both studies also exist as PhD chapter drafts that I can share with those really interested; final part will appear in some form in the conclusions of my dissertation, due end of the summer.

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While figuring out how to summarise 30+ pages chapter on my blogging practices for a talk I’m giving tomorrow I realised that it could make sense to share some of the bits from it here. This one is on the reasons to use weblog to keep information bits, using the list of factors for choosing a strategy for Keeping found things found on the web.

Portability / Number of access points. Using weblog for organising my thinking resources fits well my preferences for web-based applications in general, since I use multiple computers and I’m very likely to be online while working. In this respect server-based weblog provides much better alternative for organising my ideas than any desktop application, since I can access when I’m online regardless of the location.

Preservation of information in its current state / Currency of information. To a degree weblog allows both at the same time. I usually quote most relevant bits of external resources, so those quotes are preserved in their current state. The quotes are accompanied with a link to the original (if online), so an updated version is easily accessible. If the original disappears or is moved, I could use the quote for find it (usually it’s an updated location easily found with any search engine, otherwise I use Internet Archive Wayback machine).

Context (remembering why it was saved) / Reminding. Most of my weblog posts contain a commentary that provides a context for a specific thought or reference; I also use multiple strategies to establish connections between different posts. That context is enough to recall why certain weblog post is there and to remember to use it at a later stage (although not as effective as to-do lists to serve as a reminder of an urgent task).

Ease of integration into existing structures. From one side, my weblog is a stand-alone tool that requires its own organisation and archiving. From another, it is essentially a set of webpages connected by links, with permalinks, metadata and underlying standards. It is an integral part of my online presence (as evident by searching for my name in any search engine) and references to it could be easily included in a variety of other documents or systems.

Communication and information sharing. Sharing information via a weblog is not a specific activity, but a by-product of writing. In most cases it’s an advantage; however it limits potential uses of blogging when access to some of the weblog posts have to be restricted. Weblog is not good for a goal-driven communication to a known few people, but it is a perfect instrument for non-intrusive sharing of ideas in cases where potential audience is not well defined.

Ease of maintenance. In my case most maintenance problems are technology-related and they are the result of choosing weblog platform that provides high degree of freedom and flexibility.

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Finally I finished the transition from Radio to Wordpress. What does it mean:

• “old” Radio content (minus comments) is exported and accessible in WP; all posts that have been moved link to their Radio versions
• new layout and organisation (likely to change a lot in a coming months)
• new RSS feed location - blog.mathemagenic.com/feed/

I expect RSS readers to be automatically redirected, but if you don’t see anything after this post for a while you probably have to change it manually.

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