Mathemagenic

In summer I did interviews with several bloggers writing on “around knowledge management” topics about their practices of networking via weblogs. It took a while to work out summaries for those interviews (mainly due to all kinds of research issues), but now I’m happy to share them online. A bit of the “methodological” details are at the end of this post; the results of the study are coming up as a series of blog posts.

Interview summaries:

• Brett Miller (Theoria cum Praxi)
• Dave Snowden (Dave’s blog)
• Euan Semple (The Obvious?) - Euan asked to put audio of the interview online, it’s coming and I’ll link it here
• Gabriela Avram (Coniecto)
• Luis Suarez (Elsua)
• Martin Roell (Gute vragen)
• Monica Andre (B2OB)
• Nancy White (Full Circle Associates)
• Shawn Callahan (Anecdote)
• Ton Zijlstra (Ton’s Interdependent Thoughts)

When selecting bloggers for interviews I aimed to represent a variety of blogging and networking experiences. Bloggers were selected by what I call a “diversity snowball” approach. Since I wasn’t following KM blogophere as actively as before I first talked discussed a list of KM bloggers that might be interesting to interview with Jack Vinson and then proceeded by asking the interviewees to suggest other bloggers they thought were different from themselves. I contacted more people for the interviews, but had to sopt somewhere due to the logistics around summer holidays and looming PhD deadlines. I’d love to be able to hear from more bloggers about their own practices - hopefully sharing the results of this study online helps to have a public conversation on those.

When asking bloggers to participate I indicated my intentions of publishing summaries of the interviews and draft results online, as well as using their real names and links to their weblogs in the reports. Semi-structured interviews covered the following themes:

• professional background of a participant and characteristics of her network in KM field prior to blogging
• changes in the network or networking practices because of blogging
• uses of weblogs for developing, maintaining and activating relations as a starting point for articulating stages of the process at more granular level
• place of the weblog in the ecosystem of networking tools (mainly focusing on what weblogs are good for and when they do not work).
• important networking-related issues that haven’t been discussed

I did all interviews via Skype, recorded them and made notes. I then used anonymised summaries of the interviews to discuss emergent themes with two other researchers (colleagues who are aware of my work, but not blogging themselves or doing research on blogging). That discussion served as an input to start working on the study results and on revising summaries to make sure they included important information. Revised summaries were sent to the participants, edited to address their comments and then published online.

An overview of the study as a whole as well as the results are coming up soon!

No Comments yet »

One of the things I want to understand in a study I’m working now is the role of weblogs in an ecosystem of tools bloggers use to connect with each other. As part of this process I looked what changed in my own ways to connect with other bloggers as new tools appeared (=I looked only at those that appeared after I started blogging, changed something and are not “blog tools”, so email, IM, RSS readers and various blogsearch/indexes are not here):

I can imagine that for others the picture would be different, but I guess that for many of us two thing are true: weblog is only one of many tools to connect with other bloggers and with each new technology the exact niche of blogging becomes smaller and better defined.

1 Comment »

I has been struggling for a while to figure out how comes that ‘individualistic’ weblogs support community formation. Paul Hodkinson provides an elegant answer to my question in his chapter on LJ goths in Uses of blogs:

Wellman and Gulia have distinguished between superficial “weak ties,” which are confined to a narrow shared interest and take place within a single domain, and “strong ties,” which involve extensive familiarity and are played out in a variety of domains. Through enabling individual goths to read about and comment upon a variety of aspects of one another’s individual, everyday lives, rather than just those aspects directly related to the goth scene, online journals played an important part in the development of strong, intimate relationships between them, which nearly always extended to other forms of interpersonal communication, whether email, online chat, mobile phone, or, most importantly, face-to-face interaction. In turn, the development and/or reinforcement of such strong, multiplex ties between goths served to reinforce participants’ general sense of investment in and attachment to the goth scene as a community. (pp.191-192)

Other interesting things in the chapter: moving from group spaces to weblogs, descriptions of online/offline dynamic around goth events, blogs as a way to reinforce culture. It’s about goths, but lots of things apply to other blogging subcultures (KM blogging, for example :)

References:

Hodkinson, P. (2006). Subcultural Blogging? Online Journals and Group Involvement among UK Goths, in A.Bruns & J. Jacobs (Eds.), Uses of blogs, pp. 187-197. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Wellman, B. and M. Gulia (1999) `Virtual Communities as Communities: Net Surfers Don’t Ride Alone’, in M. Smith and P. Kollock (Eds.), Communities in Cyberspace, pp. 163—90. London: Routledge.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/16.html#a1955; comments are here.

No Comments yet »

It’s online as promised.

Efimova, L. & Ben Lassoued, A. (forthcoming) Weblog-mediated relationship: a co-constructed narrative, in S. Holland (Ed.) Remote relationships in a small world, Peter Lang Publishing.

Weblogs provide a fertile ground for finding interested others and getting into closer contact. As visible from our case, the beginning of this process can be asymmetrical and doesn’t necessary imply a commitment to communicate from both sides, but over time blogging strangers can turn into blogging friends. Based on our own case we cannot provide definite answers why this happens, but there are a few factors that did it for us: reciprocity of potential benefits from communicating to each other, vulnerable writing and an ability to go beyond blogging in our choice of communication media.

A few notes:

• It refers to lots of existing bits and pieces:

• blog posts/comments that are treated as artefacts
  • most of those are linked from the text and I’ll see if I can make a visualisation with linking (since not all of those appear referenced in the text)
  • those links (for obvious reasons) will not appear in the printed version
• meta-pieces (drafted fragments of the paper)

• Co-constructing: a story of weblog-mediated relationship
• Artefacts of a weblog-mediated relationship: a visualisation
• Blogging as learning vs. blogging as knowing
• Edges

• Co-constructed narrative (1)
• Co-constructed narrative (2) (with notes)
• Artefacts of a weblog-mediated relationship (with notes)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/10/19.html#a1846; comments are here.

No Comments yet »

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.

No Comments yet »

I has been struggling for a while trying to understand how relations develop via weblogs, as well as the role of weblog conversations and all kinds of other ‘backchanneling’ tools in the process.

One of the problems you have to face whily researching those things is the problem of visualisations: how to make sense of conversations distributed between people, places and times (e.g. how to put in one picture weblog posts, links between them, comments, authors of all those and ideally a timeline as well?).

The picture on the right is another attempt. It comes from the work I did with Andrea on co-constructing a story of our relationship, which involved mapping communication artefacts that were part of the process*. I’d appreciate any feedback regarding (un)clarity of it and suggestions of alternatives…

Things I wanted to include:

• different types of artefacts and their relationships (=links between)
• authorship and space (so it’s clear when I write a blog post in my own space linking to Andrea’s post or comment to Andrea’s blogpost ‘there’)
• timeline

Some things that come from the picture (you may also want to check notes at Flickr version of the drawing):

‘Direct communication’** with each other is embedded in other blogging activities: weblog posts, directly relevant for our relationship represent only a fraction of posts each of us write during the analyzed period. Although those “other” posts are not directly relevant for the communication, they provide the context for it.

There are moments of delay and long time-spans between initial posting and linking/comment on it.

In the beginning the communication is asymmetrical: it takes time before I explicitly acknowledge that I am aware of Andrea’s existence by commenting on her blog posts and linking to her blog. Later there are other signs of asymmetry: Andrea links to me more than vice versa; my comments are less frequent and timely than Andrea’s.

What started as a weblog-mediated relationship involves multiple artifacts: my published paper, del.icio.us bookmarks, email conversations and Skype exchanges later on. Different tools are used simultaneously; email and Skype exchanges correspond to intensified blogging.

* The idea of describing and analyzing our own weblog-mediated relationship came into life during one of our first Skype talks. The analysis includes our communication till that date, since the moment when we decided to work on the shared product changed the nature of our relationship and interactions. We also eventually met in person, but this is out of the picture too.

** ‘Direct’ is a wrong term - when one of us writes a weblog post later answered by another, in most of the cases it’s not ‘directed’, but instead written ‘to the world’, as weblog as a meduim lends itself to it. In this case ‘direct communication’ means ‘those of our writings that became part of an on-going conversation between us’.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/10/03.html#a1839; comments are here.

No Comments yet »

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.

No Comments yet »

Somewhere in the morning he asks: “Have you actually met Andrea?”

“No.” And, feeling that I need an excuse, I add – “but I have stayed myself in the houses of bloggers I never met”. He smiles understandingly and I hope that he really understands, even if it looks a bit crazy…

Later during the day, in between work and cleaning the house, I think that indeed it’s a bit crazy – that sort of crazy that became a lifestyle for me. Somehow, relations with other bloggers need to cross the boundary between online and offline. Somehow, being in a weblog-mediated contact often turns into a need (often an urge ;) to meet – to move on slow mediated conversations into real life exchanges, to see how much real person is close to that imaginary friend you construct while reading a weblog, emailing and skyping in between, to confirm that you are indeed as close in the real life as it feels from online. And, blogging seems to create not only this need, but also the trust needed to cross the boundary with a bit intrusive “I’m in the city – shall we meet?” or “so, why don’t you come here?”, to go the extra mile of arranging the logistics and to sound convincing while explaining to others why you actually do those crazy things…

In the evening, when we meet for the first time, I feel strange. I know that feeling from before, meeting someone you feel you know quite good, while realizing that you probably don’t really know the person. The appearance, the physical presence is unfamiliar, so my brain resists accepting that I could actually know her, but then small details start kicking in – the voice that I know from Skype, personal things that I knew or that fit well with those I knew, references to old blogging themes… And while the conversation develops, my brain is getting more and more convinced – this is not a total stranger, we do click in so many ways, starting a conversation from the point where it was left last time, we probably do know quite a bit of each other and those – unblogged – details that come up now seem to fit that fuzzy picture constructed over time of reading what was in the blog and what was in between the lines…

And, symbolically, first of this spring narcissi’s stand in the sunlit living room – reminding of those last year, the process of discovering my connections with ethnography that, beyond all other things, turned into connection with Andrea and brought her into my house…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/23.html#a1744; comments are here.

No Comments yet »

This is how I blog now - I convince Ton to blog and then interesting things happen :)

It’s about relations and networks, information architecture as scaffold, processes in KM, and even the essence of KM itself. Read it yourself (may be useful to start from an overview and summary by Julian).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/15.html#a1739; comments are here.

No Comments yet »

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.

No Comments yet »