This is an English draft for the second of two articles I wrote on blogging for Dutch magazine Informatie Professional (the first one – Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas). The Dutch version should appear very soon, but I’m too impatient to wait for it to share the draft :)  I’ll add the reference/link as soon as it’s there.

Update – see: Efimova, L. (2010). Bloggen for kenniswerkers: het nieuwe netwerking. Informatie Professional, February 2010, pp.22-25.

This piece is based on the study of networking practices of KM bloggers. Practically everything from the study (including interview summaries) is covered in my blog and Chapter 5. of my dissertation, but this article provides a condensed version of the insights.

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When I interviewed early adopters of weblogs for my PhD research many of them mentioned their surprises that blogging can go beyond documenting own thinking or publishing to the world and that it actually helps to build relationships with others. Bloggers talked about “explosion” of their professional networks as a result of blogging and meeting people that they would not be likely to meet otherwise.

These days, people almost count on social effects of blogging, however it is not always obvious how exactly blogging helps to build reputation and relationships and what is required to make it work that way. Below is what I’ve learnt from the study that looks at networking practices of knowledge management bloggers: how weblogs help bloggers to discover each other and to build relationships.

Finding others and being found

Weblogs help to discover interesting others by serving as magnets and filters. Similar to a magnet that can help finding a needle in a haystack, passionate writing attracts people interested in topics you blog about, inviting them to comment and link back. Filtering works similar to personal recommendation: following links in blogs of people you trust you are more likely to discover interesting others than by direct search.

Connections established as a result of blogging often cross geographical,topical and hierarchical boundaries. Since weblogs are rather person-centred than strictly focused on a predefined topic, a blogger often writes about a variety of personally relevant issues, exposing readers to potentially new and unexpected topical areas and other bloggers within those. Also, in the blogging world interesting content often means more than one’s age, gender or place in an organisational hierarchy: for a new reader it is blogger’s thinking that it visible first, not the profile information. This makes blogging especially useful for newcomers and “minorities” in a particular field, giving them an opportunity to be visible next to the established experts. Those who have reputation and visibility prior to blogging might have a headstart in amount of readers, but they will have to prove that that attention is worth it with every post they write.

Public figures and quiet observers

A weblog serves as “living portrait” of its author. It is different from a well-written biography or professional website. Rather, the impressions of who the blogger is are formed by picking up personal details and cues about one’s personality and passions from multiple blogposts and by observing one’s thinking and interactions over time, similar to making an opinion of public figures by the media coverage of their life.

This visibility comes with both benefits and challenges. From one side, it provides others with an opportunity to get to know a blogger personally before deciding if and when to engage further. In the professional world a weblog could be the starting point for inviting its author to speak at a conference, to work on a project or even to apply for a job. And, in  contrast to celebrities, whos life is covered by others, the blogger himself has a great deal of control about the information that appears in his weblog. If a weblog provides a true reflection of its author’s interests, then the contacts that follow from it are likely to provide personally relevant opportunities for further conversations and growth (bloggers tend to expect it and frown at marketing emails that are not personalised based on information in their blogs). Finally, reading weblogs also helps to stay in touch with one’s existing contacts, providing information about their thinking and relevant events without a need to ask them directly.

From another side, such visibility might be a challenge. Since it’s easy to read weblogs without making yourself visible, contact that might follow are often asymmetrical: bloggers have to figure out how to deal with socially awkward situations talking to strangers who know them pretty well. It is also difficult to control what exactly others pick up in a weblog and what do they read between the lines, especially since weblog content might be easily exposed to the audiences that the blogger didn’t have in mind while writing. In addition, a weblog provides a visible trace of one’s actions and mistakes: what is written may stay “out there” forever and be searched, aggregated, transformed and linked back to the author, so it is essential to learn how to make mistakes in public and how to handle them gracefully.

Relationship-building interactions

While writing a weblog helps to be discovered and known, it takes more to turn first contacts into trusted relationships. The connections between bloggers grow through interacting over time, starting from conversations in blog comments and between weblogs.

Participating in weblog conversations is not easy, since the replies appear in many places: in the comments to particular post, in posts by other bloggers that link back or even outside of blogging, for instance when the link is passed along on Twitter. Bloggers stress the importance of monitoring where the comments on their thinking appear to be able to continue the conversation and to let the readers know that their attention is appreciated. Interactions with others, fragmented over time, help to build trust and knowledge of each others. Also, the distributed nature of these conversations provides good opportunities for collective sense-making: ad-hoc conversations that can be picked up a few weeks later, unexpected connections when one’s ideas become visible outside of the usual circle and emergence of patterns based on where the attention of others goes.

With mutual interest initial engagement via weblogs is continued connecting via other tools: email, phone or instant messaging for more focused or more private discussions, wikis and shared documents to collaborate on writing, social networks, photosharing or microblogging tools to share updates in alternative formats. Meeting in person plays an important part as well: bloggers tell stories about making an extra effort to meet other bloggers and about the excitement from being able to continue conversations started via weblogs while sharing food and drinks. Over time the knowledge of each other, trust and a history of interaction becomes a valuable resource, allowing bloggers to tap into their network with questions and problems or collaborate on specific projects.

Is it worth it?

The networking effects of blogging do not appear in a few days: it takes time and effort to produce engaging content, to monitor where comments appear and to continue conversations via weblogs and other tools. Visibility can also turn into an information overload, with more interesting people to connect to than time for meaningful connections. However, initial effort that goes into establishing one’s online presence via a weblog, building relationships and learning the specifics of doing that via blogging often pays back over time. This is when the wealth of posts accumulated in a weblog continues to attract new readers, having a broad network to rely on helps to get work done faster and smarter, while the effort of staying in touch is minimal.

It also helps to think of a weblog as a front garden: while it’s nice to impress passer-bys or strike a conversation with neighbours, it makes much more reason to invest in it if it’s also valuable for oneself – to sit there with a book or to pick up the flowers for a bouquet. Similarly, networking via blogging is more sustainable when it comes as a side effect of creating personally valuable weblog content rather being the main reason for blogging.

• Teams, communities and networks in terms of communication forms
• For me blogging is about conversations
• A Brief Overview of the Linguistic Attributes of the Blogosphere

When I talk about blogging I often tell that it’s individual, but most of the good things that come out of it are the result of being part of a blogging ecosystem. Which often brings questions on how to do so.

The ecosystem is all about connections – between people and online bits (if you are academically-inclined you might be interested to read Blogging Practices: An Analytical Framework by Jan Schmidt, at least in the part that discusses relations). To make those connections two things are important: what tools do you use and what do you do with them.

To get an idea of what tools are in the play, I suggest to browse through The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You. Then:

• if you are blogging make sure your weblog software produces newsfeeds, notifies ping servers, sends and receives trackbacks, and allows search engines to index weblog pages
• if you are introducing blogging inside an organisation make sure that your intranet includes weblog indexes, aggregators and search engines

Now to what you can do:

• Read other weblogs – it’s essential to get to know people, to become inspired and to learn how the whole blogging thing works by watching others doing it.
  • find a couple of blogs (e.g. via blogsearch.google.com) and start reading them; follow links and you will discover more
  • get yourself a newsreader, subscribe to interesting blogs, but don’t be afraid not to read everything
• Participate in conversations by writing and linking
  • comment! make sure comments are meaningful and leave link to your weblog
    • if you want to get an overview of all your comments you can try BackType
  • write good stuff and link to those who inspired you, when possible directly to a specific blogpost
    • some ideas on how to get more comments on your blog
• Monitor
  • comments by subscribing to comment notification for your own blog (usually via your blog software) and comment discussions in other blogs that you want to continue
  • who links to your blog – if your blog software doesn’t do it take this example and put your blog address after link:
    • subscribing to the results via newsreader makes life easier
  • and then continue the conversation
• Spread the word outside of blogging
  • share links to good stuff written by others (via microblogging, social bookmakring, etc.)
  • connect your weblog to other tools (add link to email signature and social network profiles, add notifications about new blog posts on Twitter, etc.)

All these looks like a lot of work. It is, especially in the beginning. With blogging – in the same way as in an offline life – relationship building takes time and effort.

• In case you want more on weblog-mediated relationship building you may want to check stuff I wrote on the blog networking study (most of it appears in Chapter 5 of my dissertation).
• Also: a very old (2004 ;) post with pictures that explain how this ecosystem thing works – Weblog networks as social ecosystems

• Withdrawal from blogging: broken routines
• Escaping categories
• Don’t tell me how to blog

Papers from 3rd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem (see also papers from 2004 and 2005 workshops).

• *Leave a Reply: An Analysis of Weblog Comments, Gilad Mishne and Natalie Glance
• The Ties that Blog: Examining the Relationship Between Social Ties and Continued Participation in the Wallop Weblogging System, Thomas Lento, Howard T. Welser, Lei Gu and Marc Smith
• *Blogs During the London Attacks: Top Information Sources and Topics, Mike Thelwall
• Experiments on Persian Weblogs, Kyumars Sheykh Esmaili, Mohsen Jamali, Mahmood Neshati, Hassan Abolhassani and Yasaman Soltan-Zadeh
• **Discovery of Blog Communities Based on Mutual Awareness, Yu-Ru Lin, Hari Sundaram, Yun Chi, Jun Tatemura and Belle Tseng
• Characterizing the Splogosphere, Pranam Kolari, Akshay Java and Tim Finin
• Detecting Blog Spams using the Vocabulary Size of All Substrings in Their Copies, Kazuyuki Narisawa, Yasuhiro Yamada, Daisuke Ikeda and Masayuki Takeda
• Collaborative Blog Spam Filtering Using Adaptive Percolation Search, Seungyeop Han, Yong-yeol Ahn, Sue Moon and Hawoong Jeong
• *Decomposing Bloggers’ Moods: Towards a Time Series Analysis of Moods in the Blogosphere, Krisztian Balog and Maarten de Rijke
• **Extracting Topics From Weblogs Through Frequency Segments, Mizuki Oka, Hirotake Abe and Kazuhiko Kato
• BLOGRANGER – A Multi-Faceted Blog Search Engine, Ko Fujimura, Hiroyuki Toda, Takafumi Inoue, Nobuaki Hiroshima, Ryoji Kataoka and Masayuki Sugizaki
• *Browsing System for Weblog Articles based on Automated Folksonomy, Tsutomu Ohkura, Yoji Kiyota and Hiroshi Nakagawa

I seriousely considered going, but it would cut a week from my honeymoon… At least now there is nice collection for reading.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/06/15.html#a1777; comments are here.

• Paper – Blogging Practices: An analytical framework
• Diablog by Jon Hoem
• Lessons learned from a large-scale K-logging implementation

Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds:

Relationships everywhere move though various levels of communication as people get to know each other. While this happens in different ways in various cultures, here is on common pattern for how relationships are established.

1. Superficial level: This involves conversation generally referred to as ‘small talk’ – How are you? Where are you from? The weather or today’s headlines.

2. ‘Still safe’ level: This is an exchange of no-risk facts. Where did you go on vacation last year? What sights did you see?

3. Judgemental level: Here, we begin to risk a few statements about our opinion on politics, religion, or other matters about which our new friends might disagree with us.

4. Emotional level: We begin sharing how we feel about life, ourselves and others (e.g., that we’re sad, happy, worries, or depressed)

5. Disclosure level: We reveal our most private thoughts and feelings to another person, confession secret dreams as well as painful failures. This stage involved an honesty and vulnerability that lead to true intimacy. Most of us only have a few people in our lives with whom we share at this level. Some people have no one to share such a place. [p.133]

Although the researcher in me wants to know the sources behind this classification, it’s a nice add-on to another perspective on types of contacts we have with other people (“Life between buildings”, online):

High intensity Low intensity

Close friendships Friends Acquaintances Chance contacts Passive contacts (“see and hear” contacts)

Since the role of blogging in relation building is one of my long term interests, I immediately thought about possible parallels. While the second classification is good to catch the implicit (“passive contacts”) stage of developing relations, the first one helps to explain why blogs could be a great source for getting to know someone well enough.

IMHO, lots of good blogging starts on levels 3-5, skipping the stages of “small talk” and “no-risk facts”, since those are not likely to attract interested readers in many cases. In many cases it’s the original (opinionated :) commentary, emotions shared and vulnerable disclosures that make a weblog engaging – exactly the same things that help others to get to know the author much deeper than a casual face-to-face contact might do…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/01/19.html#a1722; comments are here.

• Blogs are smokescreens as much as windows
• Waypath: better search in the blogosphere
• Media selection

Ages ago I wrote a post explaining why I blog that between other things said:

I also blog to keep a feeling of “coffee-table dialog” with my far-away colleagues: “You know, I’ve just read this article and was triggered with these ideas. What do you think?”

That time I didn’t know that it works with near-by colleagues as well :)

When my colleagues started blogging I discovered that even if we work closely together and meet almost every day reading their blogs adds something special to it. Those “special” things are not work-related, but they are often “around work” – types of things that may come up in a coffee table discussion – books just read, vacation stories, research ideas that doesn’t seem to fit existing projects, personal news… Those things are small, but important – they turn into stronger personal connections and unexpected ideas (and they are substitute for a coffee when I’m far away :).

I wanted to write about it for quite some time and today’s post of Rogier finally triggered it. It’s my first day at work and I haven’t seen him yet, but I already know what he is doing on Saturday.

[Went to say hi because it's stupid to blog about someone when you can actually go and talk :) ]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/09/13.html#a1666; comments are here.

• Challenges on writing literature overview on business blogging (or another turn on researcher vs. blogger)
• A look at links in weblogs
• Weblog audience: how to you find your own?

I was looking for something else in my referrer logs when I saw that someone came from Google search for reflexive ethnography. I was curious to look for the results and couldn’t believe that the first link was leading to my posts in April.

Funny enough, my feelings are not that much different from those in similar case in October 2002 – it’s scary to find link to my weblog on a search for something that I’m not an expert, but just someone who starts thinking about it.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/07/28.html#a1623; comments are here.

• Share your OPML! and hidden weblog readers
• How Technorati works?
• Blog navigation bar

I was a bit mixed up after finding out that I was being researched by students as part of their assignment. Not because I’m uncomfortable with it. I’m pretty aware that my weblog is “out there” for others to study, I participated in a few weblog studies as a “case” and I’m always glad to “return” the favor even if it’s not directly to those whom I study.

Being uncomfortable comes from a feeling of intrusion into a private space – the girls researching me didn’t expect me to start studying them in turn. “Intrusion discomfort” came not so much from doing background search work (at the end what I found was published openly on the web), but from letting them know that I found them when I blogged it. I thought that they would be uncomfortable knowing that they are being watched, so I became uncomfortable myself thinking of that :)

I found kind of a middle ground. I didn’t blog any direct links and names, so at least their work didn’t get exposed to more people (don’t think others had many reasons to get curious enough about the issue to do the same background connections I did). And I didn’t look in the wiki pages about myself untill reading today in weblog of one of the authors that the assignment was finished. And, yes, somehow I didn’t have any problem subscribing to weblogs of both students.

The reason I’m writing about this that it’s unusual. Usually I wouldn’t have any problem linking to most of weblogs/wiki pages I find online, even if they are about myself. So, I wonder why I’m different this time…

It’s definitely has some connection with blog research ethics, or, probably just with blog ethics. Something around: “don’t bring into a spotlight those who think they are in a private space if you think they may not like it”.

Another reason is that it was an assignment in a course. I didn’t want to mess up whatever goals Adrian has for the assignment and I didn’t want to make it too complicated for the students.

Anyway, I’m wondering what Adrian Miles and the students would say: did I do more harm or good with putting my nose into this whole thing? could I take more freedom and link directly to students and their work? can I do it now when it’s finished?

As for me that was a nice experience:

• I thought more on how blurry are the boundaries between researcher and researched in the weblog (online?) world
• I made an interesting observation while participating in the interview that was part of the assignment, which turned into insightful comments from Lois, which have potential of turning into research questions
• While checking wiki pages about myself I found highlighted an aspect of my work that I probably should focus more and some additional reading on the topic

And this is one more illustration why I find mixing blogging and research so fun and so rewarding :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/05/04.html#a1573; comments are here.

• Beyond ‘blogs = easy webpublishing’
• OKLC04: my presentation
• Ideas turning into actions: BlogWalk and more

While I was travelling, Anjo did a great job of working out his visual settlement idea into an implementation (and I’m also a lucky one who can actually play with the software and not only enjoy images in his weblog :)

First, Anjo’s explanations (the image right is a representation of Anjo’s weblog):

Roughly the method to draw the pictures is as follows:

• Size of a blob is determined by the number of words in the post. Bigger blob, more words (in fact: every pixel represents one word).
• Colour of the blob is determined by whether there are links to others (grey), links from others (green) or no links (red). All with respect to a community of KM bloggers determined by Lilia and Stephanie
• Position of the blog is determined by the chronological order (oldest posts are in the center) and by self-linking (if a post self links back to an own post, it will appear close to the original post).

My first questions are about things Anjo didn’t clarify:

• is there any difference between squares and circles? circles and ovals?
• what color is the blob if post behind it has both, links to others and links from others?

These are two other visualisations, of my own weblog and one of Alex Halavais.

My weblog is more colored than the one of Alex. Does it mean that Alex doesn’t link or not linked back? That he is not well connected with the community? Or (which I guess is the reason) that the community was mapped as a snowballing starting from my weblog, so my “linking partners” are there, but not those of Alex. Of course, we are working on mapping the community properly, but still would be nice to have some workaround…

You can also see that Alex’ blog shows more “rays from the center” structure than mine – guess as a result of me heavily linking to older posts, so posts are grouped braking straight lines (ray structure is even more visible on visualisation of Robert Scoble’s blog). But what is behind those rays starting from the center? Are posts randomly assigned to a line or there is a logic behind it?

I’m still thinking of what else and how I’d like to see visualised. You are welcome to share your ideas.

And, if you need more inspiration, you may want to check BlogScapes by Brian Dennis, various visualisations of five years writings by Tom Coates, web-log continuum sparklines or knowledge flow sparklines…

I’m back to my usual “bad” practice: blogging when I have to work on a paper :)

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/01/26.html#a1488; comments are here.

• Shout if you want to be heard or Technorati blog finder
• Blog networking, blogwalking and being a boundary subject
• PhD dissertation on implementing blogs in manufacturing environment

One more from “was going to blog it for a long time”:

Cameron Marlow (2004). Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community. Presented at the International Communication Association Conference, May, 2004, New Orleans, LA.

Abstract. The weblog medium, while fundamentally an innovation in personal publishing has alsocome to engender a new form of social interaction on the web: a massively distributedbut completely connected conversation covering every imaginable topic of interest. Abyproduct of this ongoing communication is the set of hyperlinks made between weblogsin the exchange of dialog, a form of social acknowledgement on the part of authors. Thispaper seeks to understand the social implications of linking in the community, drawingfrom the hyperlink citations collected by the Blogdex project over the past 3 years. Socialnetwork analysis is employed to describe the resulting social structure, and twomeasures of authority are explored: popularity, as measured by webloggers’ publicaffiliations and influence measured by citation of each others writing. These metrics areevaluated with respect to each other and with the authority conferred by references inthe popular press.The weblog medium, while fundamentally an innovation in personal publishing has also come to engender a new form of social interaction on the web: a massively distributed but completely connected conversation covering every imaginable topic of interest. A byproduct of this ongoing communication is the set of hyperlinks made between weblogs in the exchange of dialog, a form of social acknowledgement on the part of authors. This paper seeks to understand the social implications of linking in the community, drawing from the hyperlink citations collected by the Blogdex project over the past 3 years. Social network analysis is employed to describe the resulting social structure, and two measures of authority are explored: popularity, as measured by webloggers’ public affiliations and influence measured by citation of each others writing. These metrics are evaluated with respect to each other and with the authority conferred by references in the popular press.

See also weblog posts with an overview and comments.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/09/09.html#a1338; comments are here.

• Studying weblogs at Microsoft: one page overview
• A Socio-Technological Approach to Sharing Knowledge Across Disciplines
• On the bursty evolution of blogspace

One more weblog to read – Working notes by Inna Kouper. Inna is a member of BROG (blog research on genre) group (more). I had a pleasure of exchanging e-mails with Inna, finding common Russian roots and watching her blog taking shape…

There are some good article reviews in Inna’s weblog, so I enjoyed reading for a while, but funny enough that my commenting was triggered by a relatively simple question:

I got the first comment on one of my posts. I really wonder how people find out that I am writing about them.

This is mysterious and exciting …

Originally I commented to the post, but then decided to copy it here as well. Could be interesting for others or for myself in retrospect. It’s slightly edited and linked.

Finding who is writing about you is not that difficult :)

Ther easiest way is Technorati – it shows links to your weblog from homepages of other weblogs.

Next to it many people can see their referrer logs – pages that bring visitors – but it depends on a software/hosting you use.

And, of course, there are many options for “egosurfing” – seaching for your name/weblog title/url in whatever search engine. Google may do, but to find blog specific references you may want to use search in Bloglines or Feedster. The best thing about the last two is that you can subscribe to a search via RSS and be notified when someone mentiones you… Finally, there is PubSub. It gives search results only in RSS, but if you can manage it (as well as complex search arguments) you can get links from all weblogs mentioning something of you. I like this one most :)

Almost forgot – there are Trackbacks as well :)))

See also: For me blogging is about conversations (why looking for others writing about you), Finding blogs linking to a specific blog post: test results (more specific how-to) and Why looking at practices of blogging is important in weblog research (associative thinking :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/08/31.html#a1326; comments are here.

• Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community
• Blogging as a coffee table dialogue
• New KM blog: Dubbings and Diversions by Jeremy Aarons