Mathemagenic

As a result of having less time to blog and increasing stress levels my blogging routines went broken:

Then I started blogging I loved it. Reading others brought all those unexpected insights and relationships that improved my work dramatically. However, it also brought heavy information overload that I wasn’t prepared to deal with. Having many (more than I could ever imagine) bits of potentially useful insights with no immediate way to process them made me feeling stressed and lost. I am a bit better now, but it’s still not working well and I still envy Ton who not only wrote about need for new information processing strategies, but also figured out how those could work for himself (check his posts on filtering, tools and routines).

The social filtering mechanisms of weblogs and content delivery by RSS feeds are usually praised for their efficiency in allowing keeping up with many information sources, in my case a weblog-induced information overload became a reality. There are a few reasons for it:

Growing network. A relatively small circle of early-adopters writing about knowledge management and learning exploded over time, as more smart people started to blog.

Multidisciplinary blogging. My blogging reflects my interests in bridging multidisciplinary boundaries, so while I started mainly on KM and learning, it eventually turned into “personal productivity in knowledge-intensive environments, weblog research, knowledge management, PhD, serendipity and lack of work-life balance” and lots of other topics. Over time this got me into a contact with a diverse group of other bloggers.

RSS overload. There were periods of 1000+ subscribers to my RSS feed, but even without trying to keep up with all of them my weblog reading list grew to more than 200 weblogs and was a challenge to keep up.

Need to converge. Expansion of my weblog network and growing amount of potentially useful information coming through it came at the moment where my dissertation ideas started to converge. At that moment reducing information intake and the degree of engagement with others was essential for processing emerging insights and integrating them into a bigger whole. Reducing time spent reading other weblogs reflected at micro-level the suggestion to “stop reading and start writing” often given to PhD students struggling to incorporate recent publications in their work.

While the withdrawal from frequent and engaged blogging was a reflection of my personal and work circumstances at that period, the main challenge was adjusting my (blog-related) information processing strategies and habits. I can imagine that at a better moment I would be able to do it, but then I was simply trying to keep up and eventually gave up: I just stopped reading blogs systematically.

In turn, writing suffered:

• Since I wasn’t reading others, writing was stimulated mainly by my own thinking and work. Although I can’t check it fast, I can imagine that the amount of outgoing links dropped dramatically.
• I wasn’t seriously following on the feedback of others on what I wrote, so potential conversations died at birth. I can also imagine that for others it was less interesting to link and to comment to someone who wasn’t very responsive.
• At the end writing wasn’t much about engaging, but more about just putting things “out there”.

When Radio stopped working in January 2008, it was easy to take an extended break from blogging (additionally motivated by the fact that it was a natural point to “freeze” weblog archive to analyse it for my dissertation).

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Trying to get back to “normal” blogging now it’s interesting to look back and to reflect on what happened with my blogging routines over last couple of years. The graph below provides an overview of a number of weblog posts I wrote per month between June 2002 and December 2007 with an indication of corresponding events in my life.

Little palm trees represent summer holidays (not necessary in some tropical location :). Winter holidays are not that obvious, but usually there is a drop in January (not in December, since Russian Christmas/NY holidays are 1-10 January and I tend to synchronise those with my family and friends in Russia).

Fire represents period of my weblog server being offline for 2 weeks after the fire that damaged the network at University of Twente (I lived on campus then and my weblog was running on my home machine).

“Relation” and “baby” - since I’ve got other things to do in my free time instead of blogging. My maternity leave in Jan-Apr 2007 is clearly visible.

“Project management” and “Microsoft”: not that important by themselves, but more as an indicator of my stress levels. In that period I was juggling coordination of an EU project, 10 weeks internship in US and personal uncertainties that came from the perspective of not returning to Russia as I had always planned.

Although all those things are important as factors behind the dropping frequency of writing, their influence is indirect. What I think is the real issue behind not blogging is broken information processing routines, especially those related to reading weblogs - those deserve a separate post…

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It’s an interesting intersection of themes and conversations. I was writing a piece on how blogging might not work in an environment where the risks of sharing half-baked ideas in public outweigh the benefits of doing so, when I realised that at the end it’s not the environment, but the way one chooses to deal with it.

An academic environment is a good example: it is makes a lot of sense not to blog work in progress, since it is exposes raw ideas to potential competition and creates all kinds of issues with publishing finished work. Just as I blogged a piece from PhD chapter on attribution and ownership, Carol reminded me of possible implications of doing so (via Facebook wall, so I’m not sure how to permalink):

saw your status update about you wondering whether to blog your PhD chapters… I personally would recommend publishing in a journal first, you could then blog about your journal paper after. But if you publish your chapters on the blog first, you may automatically restrict yourself from publishing in journals where often you are required to not have published the work anywhere in the public domain first…. it’s a copyright issue…

Well, while being well aware of the risks of doing so I still want to do it. Partly because given my longer-term plans I can afford ignoring potential problems with a journal publication, but mainly because I find more important that the results of my work reach people than that they do it in a particular format.

An environment might provide favourable (or not) conditions for blogging, but I guess the real issue is how far blogging resonates with personal values and ability/readiness to act on those values given the circumstances.

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I’m sitting on the fence in respect to deciding how to share things I write for my dissertation: while I plan to share draft chapters online anyway, I feel that it makes even more sense to share parts of it as blogposts (it’s easier to digest in smaller bites and there is no need to wait till I get chapter drafts readable as a whole). I guess I’ll just share and let you decide if you want it in pieces now or as a big chunks of text later :)

This piece is on attribution and ownership issues around ideas articulated in a weblog. I probably should add something on the blog comment ownership (see also comment with more links by Stephanie Booth - in fact she should be credited as someone who brought this stream of discussion to my attention).

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“Aren’t you afraid to write about work in progress? What if someone takes your ideas and publishes them before you do?” There countless times I had to answer those questions when talking about blogging about my research. In those situations I usually talk about the benefits of the fast feedback, opportunities for others to learn about my work without waiting for months (or years) and having access to costly academic databases, and the fact that “my ideas are there with the time stamp on them”, so there is an evidence of my authorship.

However, the issue is more complex than that. Although, according to the unwritten rules of blogging, attributing those who influenced a weblog post is essential, it is not always easy. In the following comment to one of my blog posts Alex Halavais discusses the challenges of attribution:

This is, arguably, easy enough with words, but much harder when it comes to ideas. I came up with some thoughts that, I will assert, are my own. Someone noted that these followed closely some things you had written about in your blog. I am a regular reader of your blog, and I think it is likely that these entries–at the very least–prompted my thinking in a particular direction. This tendency to remember the ideas but forget their source–the “sleeper effect”–has been shown in communication research several times over the last 50 years.

You actually know about this, because someone else made the connection and hyperlinked it. But otherwise, I would have been abscounding with your ideas without due credit. As interersted as I am in encouraging hyperlinking as attribution, there has to be a limit.

I wonder whether a standing set of citations (your “Regular reads/dialogues”) constitutes a kind of “thought group”–an indication that your ideas are at least in some part attibutable to the people you communicate with every day?

While “a standing set of citations”, usually visible as a blogroll, is helpful to give credits to others when adding a link to a specific weblog post is not feasible (also since finding relevant post in someone else’s archive is complicated, especially when there is no phrase to search with, but only an idea that “there was something relevant”), this approach does not translate well to non-blogging contexts. For example, there is a challenge of attributing ideas from weblogs in an academic publication:

Academic publications on business blogs are scarce, while there are quite a lot of white papers, case-studies from commercial companies, business publications or general media stories on the topic. And, of course, there are lots of ideas worth citing across the blogosphere.

The last one is a difficult decision. For an academic getting into research on business blogging it wouldn’t be an issue: just run search through databases of scientific publications, work with the results and pretend that the rest doesn’t exist. For me, learning about interesting issues in the field from weblogs years before something along the same lines gets “properly” published, it is a challenge. I can not pretend that the body of knowledge in weblogs doesn’t exist, but, bounded by academic conventions, I can’t figure a good way to fit it into my publications.

Even more, even if I try to give an overview of what is there on the topic across weblogs, I can’t do it according to academic standards that aim for completeness and objectivity. I know that I shouldn’t even try to provide a complete and objective picture when giving an overview on whatever issue across weblogs.

It is not easy to find to whom and how to credit when one’s ideas are inspired by reading weblogs of others and conversations in a weblog network. When those ideas leave the blogosphere and take shape of something that is part of paid work (publications, presentations, instruments, methods), lack of attribution could result in a bitter feelings as sharing one’s ideas for a “collective good” is not the same as giving them to someone who might be competing for a publication space or consulting assignments in the “real world”.

In addition, while attributing words to their authors is easy with clear authorship of a weblog, this is not necessarily the case with the ownership of those words:

The question that came into my mind: what happens with your ideas that you posted to a weblog inside certain boundaries (e.g. corporate blog or course blog) after you leave these boundaries. Both Martin and Sebastian suggest that it should be your property and you have to be able to take it with you as your own learning resource. Ideally, I would say the same, but I don’t think that it’s going to happen easily in practice.

Companies and educational institutions are recognising that they could benefit from aggregating ideas produced by people (e.g. course assignments from previous courses could be reused in a new course). An individual knowledge worker, from other hand, wants to have access to his own thought, may be throughout his whole life. This is not interesting for a company (it’s competitive advantage!) and it should be ideal educational institution to take care of it (at the end no any educational institution is responsible to your own life-long learning).

In one paper knowledge workers were addressed as investors bringing their knowledge for corporate use. This is good metaphor, but unlike real investors knowledge workers can not take their investment back. Even worse, if you leave treads of your knowledge work in corporate context they are likely to belong to a company (often copyrighted), so they in fact risk loosing some of their investments.

In a long-term this could be a problem to weblogs adoption in a corporate context: I’m more motivated to write something down if I know that it stays with me and I can come back to it than if it’s locked in a corporate knowledge management system or e-learning system [...].

This situation appears when blogging, which is not a paid activity for a blogger results in something directly relevant to an employment:

From notes of the Voxpolitics event on blogs and politics [...] about Stephen Pollard, “first major journalist in the country to be running a weblog”:

And he’s not writing for free - people respond to his comments and inspire him to write pieces for which he gets paid.

This simple phrase gets the value of blogging for free - it inspires you to come up with other pieces (with more insight/analysis/depth/structure) to get paid for.
For me it would also draw a border for copyrights: I’d like to “own” my blog (to give it away under Creative Commons) even if it is related to my work, while my company owns more elaborate products (e.g. papers) that can be inspired by it (of course when a company pays me to work on these products :).

In fact I don’t like to get paid to blog, because I want the freedom of doing it and I want to own the content. I’m also addicted to blogging enough to think that I would not be happy if I couldn’t do it. And I have scary phrases in my contract to worry about these issues :(

In the research environment, using weblog in a process of creating an article makes the issue even more clouded, since transferring of copyrights to the academic publishers often requires that no part of the work has been published before.

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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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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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Things that I’ve learnt from blogging that are relevant for ‘beyond blogging’ contexts and cases. I’m looking mainly at an intersection between blogging and work, since this is where my research and personal blogging experiences are.

[I did a "KM-flavored" version of this in my presentation yesterday, but I guess it's relatively easy to draw organisational implications for most of the points.]

Personal passions have a (legitimate) place at work. Personal stories and personal voice turn into trusted relations. Passion drives expertise. People are more likely to believe another human being than an organisation or a computer. Showing emotions, telling personal stories, being passionate could be scary (especially in a hierarchical environments with power plays), but it is becoming an essential part of work.

Transparency is here to stay. Weblogs provide a visible, often public, trace of one expertise, actions and mistakes. There is no way to escape the past, one is always accountable. It’s not easy to write knowing that it is stays ‘out there’ forever, that it will be searched, aggregated, transformed and then linked back to you. We have to learn to let go the fear of making mistakes in public and learn how to make mistakes gracefully.

Microactions aggregate. Blogging is about microcontent - publishing small pieces of thought and commentary, anchored with permalinks and carried away by feeds. However, the real value is not at the post level - ecosystems between blog posts are more interesting and more important. Think of the fuzzy feeling of knowing someone from reading a weblog over time, implicit understanding of a new issue that emerges while following a conversation between bloggers or sense of belonging to a network of others - in all cases posts and links are only a tip of the iceberg. Counting and measuring those visible traces is tempting, but knowledge, reputation, relations are likely to escape rankings.

You never know where new connections emerge, but you can create right conditions. And then be prepared to discover your own ‘connectivity limits’ :)

Information overload exists. There are millions of blog posts out there - some of them are relevant and reliable, but most extraneous, incomplete and not interesting anyway - so how do we find those to read, to trust, to connect? Information overload exists, but mainly inside our heads. The world have changed from information scarcity to information abundance, but our habits and information strategies still have to adjust to it.

Everyday routines matter. Unless you don’t have anything else to do, blogging survives only if integrated into everyday world. Starting blogging is easy, staying blogging needs much more - embedding into one’s own information routines, work processes and (inter)personal practices, as well as transforming blogging routines when life takes another turn (like becoming a parent ;).

Authority becomes fluid. Formal hierarchies are still there, but blogging provides alternative routes. However, new blogging authorities are only as good as posts on their homepages, networks constantly evolve and anyway the share of attention one gets is more and more mediated by search engines (that might drop your valuable archives from their index :)

At the end it’s up to you. Making judgments, taking risks, taking responsibility. Crossing boundaries. Having fun.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/14.html#a1954; comments are here.

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Matthew Hurst on the most important blogs for efficient readers:

A group of researchers at CMU have been considering a notion of blog importance based on how likely a set of blogs is to ensure that you will be informed of topics bursting in the blogosphere. By analogy, they consider a graph of water pipelines. Their paper - Cost-Effective Outbreak Detection in Networks Leskovec, Krause, Guestrin, Faloutsos, VanBriesen, Glance - poses the problem:

Given a water distribution network, where should we place sensors to quickly detect contaminants? Or, which blogs should we read to avoid missing important stories? These seemingly different problems share common structure: Outbreak detection can be modeled as selecting nodes (sensor locations, blogs) in a network, in order to detect the spreading of a virus or information as quickly as possible.

As a result of this work, the authors have published some blog lists which answer a fundamentally important question in terms of weblog reading habits: Which weblogs should I read to be most up to date? The lists answering this question - generated by the approach described in their paper - come in a number of varieties to be found on the project’s page.

I scanned (skipped most of the math :) through the extended version of the paper and this is something I would love to see applied to niche blogging networks. For example, starting from a subset of weblogs that mention topic X or, better, those that participate in a discussion (cascade) that mentiones topic X.

A few points relevant from the practical perspective - having a tool that helps a blogreader to make a selection of blogs to read (my expectations in that respect are pretty high given that Natalie Glance is working for Google now :)

1. “Costs” of reading. The authors played with optimising the number of blogs and number of posts one reads. Assuming that reading less blog posts is more cost-effective, the algorithm shows that “the popular blogs might not be the most effective way to catch relevant information cascades” (p.23). Instead, it makes more sense to read “good summarizer blogs that may not be very popular, but which, by using few posts, catch most of the important stories propagating over the blogosphere” (p.15).

2. Predicting the future. From a reader perspective one would like to have a recommendation of blogs that will cover most interesting stories in the future. From what I understood the algorithm does not work that well for making those predictions. The authors optimised the performance by including only big blogs (= at least one post per day), but I wonder if there are some other alternatives.

Anyway, I guess I should go back to my PhD writing and wait patiently till people who read the paper without skipping the math do something with it. So far I’m happy that the paper promises lots of interesting developments and that it also makes me feeling less guilty with our alternative approach to vaccination by suggesting that “uniform ummunization strategy corresponds to randomly placing sensors in a water network” (p.22), which in not optimal :)))

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/14.html#a1953; comments are here.

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I figured out fast that with Alexander blogging is difficult: it’s either doing it at work or at those precious moments when he is asleep or taken care by Robert. Last few days it’s even more difficult - although I have a few half-written posts, getting them online seems to be impossible.

The explanation is simple - Robert is fishing in a guys-only company in Sweden, so our little guy keeps me away from blogging (and nots of other things too :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/08/06.html#a1929; comments are here.

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