This post is part of the series describing the results of the study of blogger networking practices. Please take into account a couple of things:

• This is a draft. Healthy scepticism and comments are very welcome.
• Statements are linked to the names of people who talked about particular issue, those might be true or not true for others.

***

Next to an opportunity to learn about others from a distance, weblogs support interaction that may grow into a relation between bloggers over time. When Ton describes how interactions that start from comments help a relation to grow and strengthen, he talks about his weblog as a “gravity pull”: “it’s like they are entering your gravity field, falling towards you”.

Luis emphasises the importance of reacting to comments in his weblog as a starting point for an interaction (“last thing you can do is to ignore your comments”) telling that others appreciate the feedback. While Shawn also believes that interaction in the comments is important, he admits that he is not good in it as he uses his weblog mainly to organise his thinking rather than “as a network building or communication device if you like”. He tells that he is “not much of the typer” and leaves comments only if he “can add to a conversation in a constructive way” and then starts wondering what other people “read” into this behaviour. He also gives an example of Johnnie Moore, saying that his blogging style “seem to have the interaction going”.

Nancy echoes this point emphasising that engaging in personal connections (as opposed to “information relations” described in the section 1.5.1) depends a lot on personalities of people, as some as more likely to initiate contact and to “reach out”. Brett provides an example of others “reaching out”:

I’ve had people I’ve left comments on their blog and by doing that they discover mine and they initiated contact with me. [...] they commented on the weblog and followed it more closely [...] I guess [they were] more involved, did more steps for a relation than I did. I just commented once and they came to my site and commented frequently. To some extend it makes you feel an obligation almost to go back to theirs to read it more, to comment more. [...] I feel that I should look at their stuff more closely to see if I want to reciprocate.

Although initial contacts often happen in comments to a weblog post, at the later stage cross-linking between weblogs and trackbacks that notify bloggers about it becomes more important. For Luis linking conversations between blogs helps to “corroborate what someone else said” while also adding own experiences and sharing with others. For Euan permalinks that allow others to link directly to a weblog post “is another big thing” as “each of those little ideas could be linked to and that allows to distribute sense-making networks.” Martin describes conversations that “travelled around weblogs” as “collective intelligence” (“if we talk about questions long enough the idea would emerge somewhere”). In discussing how blogging helps to develop trust Dave talks about it as “fragmented frequent conversation” and draws parallels between blogging and the way human brains work:”We don’t tell stories to each other, we swap anecdotes and blogs are very similar to that”.

When I ask Ton about the differences between comments and conversations across weblogs he refers to the differences in format and length, as well as different types of conversations they enable:

…the comments are usually short-lived, [...] they are immediate responses to the blog post. And a blog conversation spread between weblogs goes on longer. And you can connect it to more things since if you would add links to six different blog posts in your comment it would probably be classified as a spam.

However, he thinks that those different weblog conversations are part of the same process, talking about difficulties of reconstructing paths one follows between comments, people, what they write.

Interaction via weblogs often serves as a starting point for getting in touch via other channels. Shawn suggests that “if someone got the weblog, they are inviting people to contact them” and adds that this is usually the case when he attempts to contact other bloggers by email. He adds that when contacting another blogger, the fact of both blogging creates a commonality, even if content is very different – “I am a blogger, you are a blogger, we should catch up”. Brett calls it “an instant credibility”:

Even if I don’t know someone just the fact that I saw something on their blog, posted a comment, asked a question and they see that I have one. It establishes almost an instant credibility: that this person is worth the time to respond, to read, as to say.

Gabriela explains that having weblogs that provide the context and the history of previous interactions makes contact easier: she feels she can “tap into knowledge of fellow bloggers without [providing] any details”.

Many participants talk about connecting with fellow bloggers via multiple channels. Gabriela gives an example of Jack Vinson, KM blogger she’s never met in person, and says they are mutually connected on different channels. Shawn is not constantly interacting with other bloggers via the blogosphere, saying that if it happens it’s often an email, phone or meeting in person. Luis talks about enhancing his connection with KM bloggers by knowing about their day to day life from Twitter.

For Martin other, more personal channels are needed to get to know others really well “to have a more secure exchange which is not public, to be vulnerable”, which is difficult to do in a weblog “once you become an A-lister”. Ton adds that for those relationships that are established via weblog, most of more personal communication happens via other channels (email, Skype, sharing photos and videos).

Meeting in person is often an important part of the process of building a relation: bloggers tell stories about making an effort to meet other bloggers or synergies of connecting in person after discovering that those they knew via blogging were actually in close physical proximity.

When bloggers meet the history of their interactions comes into play. Luis talks about meeting Bill Ives for the first time, while knowing him via weblog for several years:

It was amazing. [...] It was like two old pals talking about KM and picking it up where we have left it in the blogs.

Euan gives similar example:

First time I met Doc [Searls] there were hugs and smiles and really energetic enthusiastic conversation in a restaurant. And we said at that time that others in the restaurant had known that we’ve never met each other they would think we were mad.

Ton explains that meeting in person brings a relation at a new level. He gives an example of meeting Chris Corrigan and how walking in the forest having “the same conversations” they would have online, created a deeper level of understanding:

Rereading his postings I now hear his voice, but I also know in what kind of context he wrote it, and this additional information helps me interpret what he means on a deeper level.

Martin has similar experiences: “[realising] that they actually have a body helped to appreciate their writing more and use their writing more effectively”.

However, Dave is not sure meeting in person is good or bad after getting to know each other online, as some people “create a different persona in their blog” and meeting in person might results in “identity structure shifts”. When I refer to other bloggers who are eager to meet in person, he tells it depends on a scale: “I can’t afford the time to meet everybody I track or listen to”.

Interacting via multiple channels over time does not only help the connections grow and strengthen, it also contributes to the development of shared understanding and a sense of community. “And then you are talking not about silos [...], but interconnected complex network of blogs”, where bloggers know whom to go to for help or an advice (Luis). Gabriela talks about other bloggers as “permanent support network”, “a sort of fraternity” that she can rely on.

While first interactions between bloggers often happen via weblogs, as relations between bloggers grow they engage with each other via multiple channels. In that respect conversations created by linking between weblogs play a special role: those “fragmented frequent conversations” support both collective development of ideas and strengthening the bonds between bloggers. Over time meeting in person and other channels are added to the mix to continue blogging conversations, to interact in more private and secure settings and to get to know others better. Over time those interactions create a foundation that might enable bloggers to collaborate to get things done together.

• Online communication tools: designed for a group, experienced by an individual
• Hosting imaginary friends
• Going Plazes

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.

• Weblog research ethics
• Learning in the rain
• Finding blogs linking to a specific blog post: test results

• 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

Has been playing a bit more with the data from Anjo… This we are looking at the speed of linking (=number of days between two linked posts) for links to own weblog and links to others. One of the hypotheses is that people would be more likely to link to their own “very old posts” than to those of others (simply because it’s much easier to remember relevant things in one’s own weblog. The results are below (in both cases number of links on the left is cumulative):

Some notes:

• There are more self-links (1086 total) than links to others (635 total), which is strange given that most of bloggers in our sample do not link much to their own content.

• I guess we should look at the influence of outliers and to see if grouping bloggers by their self/others linking behaviour we give different picture.
• Another reason for that could be in our dataset, since only links between bloggers in the sample are counted. So, may be there is someone who links a lot outside this group and those links are not in the picture.

• Makes sense
• For longer time-frames could be screwed up by the nature of dataset: if someone links to a post which is not in it those links are not counted.

• Some numbers

• Linking to others: 50% of links come within 3 days, 90% – within 51 day, longest time between posts is 283 days
• Linking to self: 50% – 20 days, 90% – 169 days, longest time – 356

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/08/23.html#a1938; comments are here.

• Weblog conversations revisited: conversations with self
• Papers of WWW2006 workshop on the weblogging ecosystem
• Weblog networks as social ecosystems

Anjo came up with new visualisation that illustrates how conversations with self and with others are connected for a particular blogger:

1. Black: a conversation. All details about the conversation are hidden (in an interactive environment zooming in is always possible).
2. Yellow: a boundary link. A self-link into a conversation. That is, there is a personal link inside the conversation already, but no one else links to a boundary link.
3. Pink: a secondary link. A self-link to a boundary link or another secondary link.

I was almost jumping than I saw that, since it visually confirms my feeling that:

Weblogs as a conversation medium could be particularly interesting in a knowledge management context, as they provide a distributed space for perspective making and perspective taking (Boland & Tenkasi, 1995), thus creating potential for developing innovative ideas (Bonifacio & Molani, 2003). [Efimova & de Moor, 2005: 9].

Of course, not all bloggers in our dataset behave this way and there is a long way between visualising linking practices and actually saying that those help to develop knowledge :).

Finally, a picture of what I do (given that my own practices are different from the majority I have to look at the few methodological issues around it, but the good thing is that there is someone else with similar profile :).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/08/15.html#a1936; comments are here.

• Weblog research: artefacts and practices – and contexts that influence them
• Co-constructing: a story of weblog-mediated relationship
• Talking From the Inside Out: The Rise of Employee Bloggers

Earlier:

• Weblog conversations revisited: an introduction
• Weblog conversations revisited: is there more than one?

So, in our experiments with extracting weblog conversations we’ve got one that included 1000+ blog posts from 34 bloggers. Once we included self-linked posts in the analysis, several independent conversations got “glued” together by chains of self-linked posts, turning the whole thing into a mess.

Looking into self-linking was another of my interests to revisit the original research. For me self-linking is one of the indicators that (some) weblogs are written as a conversation with self:

In the simplest case, a weblog post is fully and only embedded into “a conversation with self”, a personal narrative used to articulate and to organise one’s own thinking. A single blogger could have several of such conversations simultaneously, returning to ideas over time. Next, each of the posts can trigger a conversation with others that can take several rounds of discussions as well. (Efimova & de Moor, 2005: 9)

Anjo and me have discussed a few possibilities to visualise those conversations with self (at least as far as one could do based on self-linking). One was inspired by Thread Arcs of Bernard Kerr from IBM research (which I actually found referenced in a thesis chapter by Manuel Lima describing precedents of Blogviz).

What Anjo did with it is different, but provides a nice way to visualise some patterns:

The above image is an example of a variant on the Thread Arcs idea. Left to right is time, and the arc that links connected posts is filled with a colour: the darker the colour the shorter the time span of the linked posts.

Another example. Visualisations like this can, at the very least, differentiate between those who use their weblog to create an intricate structure of linked posts over a long period of time, compared to bloggers who hardly refer to their own posts.

The final example depicts Lilia’s self-linking practices. I see waves, woods …

In the visualisations you can see clearly that self-linking is more of a personal habit rather than something that every blogger (in our sample) does consistently. Actually, as you can see from the last image, my own weblog is an extreme example of self-linking; others link to their own posts rarely.

Eventually I want to lok at the reasons for self-linking: Why some people do it and others don’t? Is it related to their uses of a weblog to document and organise their thinking? or wanting to inflate google rank? Do people who have easy tools to organise and retrieve their blogs posts (e.g. with categories or tagging) link to themselves less? Is it related to a number of blog posts? to the breadth of topics covered? to some strange personality trait? Does it change over time?

However, those visualisations still help a lot. They indicate that there are probably only several people who (because of chains of their own posts linked to each other) link separate conversations between bloggers into a whole big mess (connectors?). And they help thinking on detangling the mess :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/08/15.html#a1935; comments are here.

• Why looking at practices of blogging is important in weblog research
• Feed your blog to tOKo and see what comes out
• Blog research repository?

Context: Weblog conversations revisited: an introduction.

One of the obvious problems with analysing only one conversation in the paper is that it’s difficult to say how representative is that one for the community under study, so I wanted to use the advantage of having tools to do more automatic analysis now to say if there were other similar conversations in the community.

Basic facts of the initial conversation:

• mapped manually, by following outgoing links and trackbacks
• includes self-linking posts (those that are not linked to/from other bloggers)
• two languages (English and German)
• 23 Nov 03 – 18 Jan 2004
• 17 blogs, 30 posts, 59 comments (only 1 post and 3 comments in 2004)
• 32 people (27 of whom are bloggers; other 5 – not clear)

So what do we have now:

• weblog conversations mapped automatically, by extracting groups of posts that link to each other from
• 34 weblogs in English (see Weblog conversations revisited: an introduction on dataset and caveats)
• 1 Jan – 31 Dec 2004

While experimenting with mapping the conversations we tried two approaches: (1) only focusing on links between posts of different weblogs and (2) including self-linked posts. Obviousely, going with the second choice is needed for compatibility with the original conversation. However, when trying to extract all groups of linked posts we run into a problem: apart from several small conversations, we would get one of 1028 posts with all 34 blogs participating (I’ll blog on possible explanations later).

So, what Anjo did to detangle the whole thing (Anjo, correct me if wrong :)

1. extract groups of posts that do not inlude self-linking
2. add self-linking posts only to those in a conversation

So, those would look more or less like those pictures on the right, where pink blockes are self-linked posts added (scale and colors have changed between iterations, this is just for an idea).

An overview of what we’ve got is below (size of the bubble represents number of conversations with X blogs and Y weblog posts). From total of 182 conversations, most are very small (2 blogs, 2 linked posts), but there is a number of bigger ones. Our originally studied conversation would be in the top right area of the graph (~ conversations of that scale do happen, but not that frequently).

If you look at the graph, you can see that most of the conversations on the right shift up (number of posts in a conversation increases due to self-linking). I guess it indicates that the more complex a conversation becomes (more weblogs, more posts), the more likely it would be connected to other (=not belonging to the conversation) posts of bloggers who participate. So, it seems that people tend to get inspired by complex conversations in their future thinking (or at least find it useful to link to later on).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/08/14.html#a1934; comments are here.

• Beyond personal webpublishing: An exploratory study of conversational blogging practices
• Blog networking study: bonding through interaction
• Media selection

I’m taking another look on the work on weblog conversations we did with Aldo de Moor in 2004 (Beyond personal webpublishing: An exploratory study of conversational blogging practices). Then we did a manual analysis of a single conversation between multiple weblogs and proposed a number of characteristics of conversational blogging practices.

Since then many things changed. Not only there is much more research on all weblog things, but also now there are more tools to do weblog analysis. For my dissertation I want to use weblog analysis tools developed by Anjo (an overview – Understanding weblog communities through digital traces: a framework, a tool and an example) to extend the analysis to more conversations.

The plan is to use the data from KM blogger community. Since I still don’t have a good answer on a way to define boundaries of a weblog community, I decided to go with the data collected for the weblog community mapping work (Finding ‘the life between buildings’: An approach for defining a weblog community): posts of 30+ weblogs in year 2004.

Given that it’s 2007 now the decision to work with the old data might be strange, but I want to do it to insure compatibility with the analysis in the paper, which is based on the conversation in Nov 2003-Jan 2004. I’m pretty sure (based on non-systematic observation ;) that blogging practices have changed from 2004, most likely in respect to the following things (mainly those affecting linking between weblog posts that is at core of our definition of a weblog conversation):

• Relations between people have evolved and many conversations are moving from weblogs to other media. An example of that is in my paper with Andrea, but I guess many longer-term bloggers could tell similar stories.
• Number of (relevant) weblogs have expanded, so reading practices of some people have changed (do you read weblogs of others as closely and as consistently as in 2004? I don’t.)
• Large scale introduction of tagging and evolution of categorisation-related features of weblog tools might have changed practices of organising one’s thinking in a weblog, so there is less need to rely on linking to one’s own posts.

Other issues with the dataset:

• The community membership is defined in some (attempting to be objective, but far from perfect) way. Some members are probably missing, others do not necessary belong to the community if defined in other ways (e.g. based on topical analysis).
• We have only weblog posts (and not comments) in the dataset, which limits the analysis (e.g. we can’t do a proper comparison with the conversation analysed in the paper with Aldo, which included weblog posts and comments).
• Some conversations may span boundaries of a community, so those will not be discovered or will be “truncated”.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/08/12.html#a1933; comments are here.

• Comparing weblog text to the PhD dissertation via tagclouds
• BlogTalks 2.0
• Bibliography conventions when writing on weblogs

Adding my 5 cents to a conversation on trust and weblogs:

Patricia Arnold:

In this blog discussion I see a question of trust. I need to know with whom I’m taking. That’ the opposite of the blogger’s attitude. Whoever is reading it is problematic. It’s too anonymous. Trust is missing.

Nancy White:

The trust issue, Patricia, is very salient. I was talking a few weeks ago with John and Etienne about a different kind of trust I see in network systems, like blog networks, and I think there is a very strong informational trust. Not that I have to get to know you to trust you ,but I have to get to know what you write about and how you write about it to trust you. But it is a different sort of trust. Not so much about personal identity, but domain related identity. Does that make any sense?

Have a mixed feelings about this. From one side I agree with Nancy that blogging is about “I have to get to know what you write about and how you write about it to trust you”, but I wouldn’t call it “domain related identity”. Domain related trust is an important factor in a continuing to read a weblog or engaging into interactions with its author, but this is not enough to invite the blogger to stay in your house or to go an extra mile to meet or engage into doing work together.

For me trust means some degree of emotional understanding and attachment and it is always involves getting to know the person behind any content. It’s about trusting a blogger as a person, not as an information source. Ask me about bloggers I really trust and I’d probably tell you more about what kind of people they are, than about content of their weblogs.

I guess that in the conversation there is another aspect as well. Patricia talks about writer’s trust (I have to know and trust my readers to know how to talk to them), while Nancy about readers’s trust (when I read your weblog I start trusting you). Those are very different, since when you write a weblog your audience include readers with all kinds of relations to you, including those that come there from Google. So, I guess the question of trust in a weblog conversation is to a great degree about being able to speak to trusted and unknown audiences at the same time (next to that there is always an issue of ambiguity – you never know who is listening and you can’t really count on someone talking back).

Weblog conversations are very different from those of a closed forum: you don’t know exactly who is listening, how far they are interested, what would happen next. Writing a weblog post is not a deliberate activity of engaging into a conversation, but always an opportunity to have one – a possibility for an interaction.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/10/16.html#a1844; comments are here.

• My Friday 5: bloggers I’d love to meet
• Blog networking study: choosing channels
• Weblog conversation tracking tool

Anjo is moving further in developing a blog-friendly version of tOKo (related to all our earlier work on weblog communities, conversations and topics):

A little bit of progress on the open source version of tOKo (and the like), and in particular making it suitable for bloggers.

The first problem is turning a (your?) blog into a corpus. tOKo is pretty flexible as to what a corpus looks like, but the process must be automated. Jack Vinson and Ton Zijlstra provided great help by converting their blogs to a Movable Type export file and making the result available. Therefore, tOKo now contains a “Create corpus from Movable Type” function. The nice thing is that several blogging platforms provide Movable Type (MT) export. For example, in TypePad (which I use) a MT file can be generated from the web interface. Moreover, an MT file contains all information, including comments and trackbacks.

I’m getting into research fun anticipation – getting hold of comments next to post text would be such a great thing for the analysis :)

And, if want to help to develop the tool you can contribute your blog archives in Movable Type format (WPexport could be handy for WordPress users). This especially makes sense if you feel belonging to KM bloggers community (paper) – or, as Anjo puts it:

If you have linked to Jack, Ton, Lilia or myself in the past, this would be particularly interesting (also if you can only export to Movable Type). The only disadvantage of making your weblog available is that I might ask you to alpha-test tOKo :-).

My email address is: anjo science uva nl (one at, two dots).

You get a bit more insight about this work from Ton’s impressions on the work in progress and Anjo’s visualisations (1, 2, 3, 4).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/04/11.html#a1761; comments are here.

• BlogTalk 2.0: coopetition and research blogging
• Bibliography conventions when writing on weblogs
• Weblog research ethics (3)

The idea of describing and analyzing our own weblog-mediated relationship came into life during one of our first Skype talks: despite of different backgrounds both of us were exploring weblog practices, interested on online ethnography, and fascinated by reflective and autoethnographic writing. We desided to try writing it as a co-constructed narrative.

***

Co-constructed narrative (Ellis & Bochner, 1992) is “a way to study relationships that would more closely reflect how we live them in everyday life” (Ellis, 2004: 71).

According to Arthur Bocher (Bocher, 2003: 91):

This type of research focuses on the international sequences by which interpretations of relationship life are constructed, coordinated, and solidified into stories. The local narratives that are jointly produced thus display couples in the process of ‘doing’ their relationships, trying to turn fragmented, vague, or disjointed events into intelligible, coherent accounts.

From our perspective this way of working is useful in providing a view on blogging from an insider’s perspective, since it allows to include in the analysis personal interpretations and the artefacts that difficult to get hold otherwise, and to explore any asymmetry in the relationship.

***

First, each of us independently constructed a (hi)story of our relationship. Those two stories contained both: “objective” timeline of interactions with references to digital traces each of us was able to recover and “subjective” personal interpretations of what has happened. We emailed the stories to each other and then tried to work on “co-constructing” the whole from those pieces.

It didn’t work: although we were able to organize bits and pieces in a chronological order, neither of us was feeling that we get closer to understanding the whole. It is difficult to say, what was the reason for it. Could be the fact of getting into a co-authoring endeavor after knowing each other online for only a few months, lack of rich context glues from missing face-to-face meetings or simply many personal changes both of us were going through at that time.

In any case, we were able to move further only when we had an opportunity to meet each other for the first time. After spending quite a few hours sharing details of our personal lives (those that didn’t find much place in both of our not-so-personal weblogs), we started to work on the story.

To recreate the process of interactions we printed weblog entries and comments that involved both of us. In addition we printed out bookmarks of each other blog entries, emails that we exchanged, and Skype chat histories. All of these “traces” contained date and time stamps. We made decisions to include in our analysis only those of first three months of our interactions, the time before we decided to work on the paper together.

To create an overview of our interactions we arranged printed “conversational” fragments and corresponding “interpretive” story pieces in a chronological order, keeping separate columns for each communication space and interpretations (see the notes).

Organizing those fragments and trying to retrace our actions helped us to discover those we missed at the first sight: weblog posts one of us wouldn’t consider relevant, but linked from another, comments that were there originally, but disappeared… We also realized what we miss by not having notes or recordings of our voice conversations on Skype (we had only transcripts of chat that accompanied it – it was used mainly for exchanging links and references to support “main” voice conversation). We were not immediately sure during which of our Skype talks we decided to work on this story, so we needed to rely on the secondary evidence (e.g. “action point” emails) to figure it out.

The process of organizing the story from fragments came to be the rich source of insights and reflections of what has happened: finally each of us were able to see the logic and feelings of another person, to connect actions, reactions and interpretations, to discover and question discrepancies. As we worked on constructing the story, we added a meta-layer of those observations to it (those are yellow post-its in the photo on the right). For the first time we were actually able to “see and feel” what has happened and to analyze the emergent themes in a systematic way.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/30.html#a1750; comments are here.

• Talk at IBM: Blogging for knowledge workers
• Blog networking study: interviews
• Blogologue about blogologue