Today I’ll be talking to social software evangelists at IBM about some of the insights about blogging from my PhD research. While there are many things that I would love to fit in there, most of the presentation is focused on “what’s in it for me?” questions, explaining how blogging helps to develop ideas and how it supports personal networking, with bits at the end about facilitating blogging.

Slides are below, but for those of you who prefer reading instead there are also pointers for blogposts and publications at the end of this post.  Some of them are also linked from the presentation notes.

[Slides will be here as soon as Slideshare starts cooperating :) At the mean time you can download them here or here.]

• What’s in it for me?
  • Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas
  • Blogging for knowledge workers: personal networking
    • In-depth on blog networking study: interview summaries and findings in detail
• Blogging in business settings
  • Key PhD findings – PhD conclusions: blogging practices of knowledge workers (also: dissertation, pp.207-216)
  • What pragmatists might want to know about blogging (dissertation, pp.228-231)
  • Facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments (dissertation, pp.231-233)
  • More specific examples about integrating blogging and work from the Microsoft study – Efimova, L. & Grudin, J. (2006). Microsoft and the art of blogging. Inside Knowledge, 10(4), 24-27.
• Things relevant to that came up in the discussion (will edit later!)
  • Re: information overload – Dealing with a network expansion and filtering information it brings
  • Blogging for myself or for others?
  • Author-centred vs. topic-centred blogging
  • Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging
  • Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging: affiliation and attribution
  • Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging: other bloggers

• Weblog citations
• More on Microsoft: aggregation and feedback loop
• BlogTalk 2.0: Panel 3

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.

***

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.

• Blog networking and crossing boundaries for CPsqure research and dissertation fest
• Blog networking study: presenting oneself through blogging
• Socio-technological approaches to facilitating knowledge sharing across disciplines

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. It also comes from the discussion of the study results and surely needs more work.  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 non-personal relationships, blogging also enables the building true human connections;

..not pretend or unreal or virtual relationship, the real relationship, where you build up trust and affect and those powerful things that make people work together. Online. (Euan)

What exactly helps to establish and maintain personal relations via blogging? The insights from the research on strong and weak ties (Granovetter, 1973; see also Haythornthwaite, 2005, for a summary of the follow-up research) indicate that the type and frequency of interaction, as well as the number of channels used for it, are important, since stronger ties include frequent and more intimate interaction via a number of channels. While the study results do not provide data on changes in the frequency of interactions between bloggers when their relationships strengthen, they do indicate that those with stronger connections interact on multiple occasions, use different channels and communicate about personal issues as well as professional ones.

An additional view on the factors in the process of growing and maintaining a relationship is provided by Bonnie Nardi (2005), who draws on the research on instant messaging and face-to-face communication (Nardi, Whittaker, & Bradner, 2000; Nardi et al., 2002) to propose that communication includes relational aspects as well as information exchange. The relation between a pair of people creates “a state of communicative readiness in which fruitful communication is likely” (Nardi, 2005, p.91) and includes three dimensions of connection: affinity, commitment and attention. Those dimensions are recognisable in the study presented in this chapter.

According to Nardi affinity is achieved through activities of social bonding – touching, eating and drinking together, sharing experiences in a common space and informal communication – that make people feel connected with each other.

Three of the social bonding activities appear in the data. Although not easily supported by blogging itself, eating and drinking together is clearly important: restaurants are mentioned frequently as a place to meet other bloggers, “Having a coffee” is an important part of microblogging updates and it is food reviews that bloggers mention when talking about Bill Ives, not other items from his weekend blogging list that include, according to the header of his weblog, “art, music, travel, and food”.

Informal communication is supported by the personal nature of blogging: the freedom to choose what to write provides enough opportunities to share jokes, talk about hobbies or “pontificate about life, the universe and such” (Euan). KM bloggers refer to “personal details” on weblogs that help to get to know others, but those serve as conversation starters as well (it is similar in other studies, e.g. bloggers in the study by Lori Kendall (2007) report that posts with something amusing or trivial received more comments than others).

KM bloggers talk about their experiences of connecting to others in terms of sharing spaces: Dave refers to getting to know others in a way similar to how it works in a “common room in a university”, Brett talks about blogging as casual conversations at a water-cooler, Ton talks about “shared spaces” online, neighbourhoods and global villages, Martin appreciates others “coming” to his “place” to leave comments… My own blogging experiences resulted in similar feelings and multiple attempts to explain what might create them (for example, this one).

Commitment is another dimension that Nardi introduces as important. In the case of KM bloggers, expressing commitment to others is manifested through the effort of reading their weblogs (“they took the effort to read what I write”, Luis), repeated interaction and maintaining their own presence via weblogs and other channels.

Finally, capturing and monitoring attention includes, for example, eye contact or negotiating availability of others. In the case of bloggers, linking is often perceived as a sign of attention, and considerable effort goes into monitoring incoming links that help to find new bloggers or keep track of fragments of conversations between weblogs. While weblogs are rarely used explicitly for negotiating availability for an interaction (this is where other channels come into play), they do provide an opportunity to indicate one’s interest in communicating, via comments or linking to a weblog, and leave it open as to if, when and how much one wants to engage in a further exchange.

In creating relationships, publishing and interaction modes of blogging play a role. For non-personal relations to emerge and be sustained, the publishing mode of blogging is enough; in this case, uses of a weblog are informational. For establishing and maintaining personal relations, both publishing and interaction are important. Interaction through weblog conversations helps to develop and renew relations, but it does not happen all the time. Publishing mode (both, reading and writing) provides a backdrop for a relationship: sharing ones’ updates to the network without needing to worry about “spamming” others, developing knowledge of each other, feeling that others are “present” or monitoring when the right moment occurs for an interaction. The power of blogging in respect to networking seems to come from an opportunity to combine two modes with one tool.

***

Granovetter, M. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. Americal Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380.

Haythornthwaite, C. (2005). Social networks and internet connectivity effects. Information, Communication and Society, 8(2), 125-147. doi:10.1080/13691180500146185 (public .pdf)

Kendall, L. (2007). “Shout Into the Wind, and It Shouts Back” Identity and interactional tensions on LiveJournal. First Monday, 12(9).

Nardi, B., Whittaker, S., & Schwarz, H. (2002). NetWORKers and their activity in intensional networks. Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 11(1-2), 205-242. doi:10.1023/A:1015241914483 (public .pdf)

Nardi, B. A. (2005). Beyond bandwidth: dimensions of connection in interpersonal communication. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 14(2), 91-130. doi:10.1007/s10606-004-8127-9 (public .pdf)

Nardi, B. A., Whittaker, S., & Bradner, E. (2000). Interaction and outeraction: instant messaging in action. In Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 79-88). doi:10.1145/358916.358975

• Blog changing way we meet people
• On being a geek and TabletPC
• KM Europe 2004: highlights

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.

***

The variety of channels bloggers use to engage with each other creates the need to choose which of them to use.

In the process of developing relations with each other, bloggers engage in finding and being found, getting to know other bloggers from a distance, bonding through interaction, getting things done together and staying in touch. Those practices are supported by uses of different channels to connect with each other. Weblogs serve primarily as a channel for discovering bloggers and getting to know them from a distance. While bonding through interaction starts via weblog conversations, eventually it is likely to include meeting in person and the use of other channels, such as email, Skype, phone or microblogging. Finding and “screening” each other via weblogs, as well as shared understanding, trust and a history of interactions enable bloggers to get things done together, however, such collaboration mostly happens outside of blogging. Although weblogs are used to stay in touch, other tools increasingly support this, especially those allowing broadcasting one’s current status to the network, for example with presence indicators in Skype or microblogging updates.

The table below summarises bloggers’ choices between using weblogs (in two modes, publishing and interaction) and other channels to support networking.

When it comes to bonding through interaction, doing work or staying in touch, bloggers pick and choose tools that suit their needs and specific circumstances. My interactions with the participants during the course of this study provide an illustration.

As I did not have much contact with some of the participants prior to the study, I looked through their weblogs for an appropriate mean of contact. I used existing connections on a variety of channels, but also added more connections during the study (email addresses, Twitter, Skype, social network contacts). I used Twitter, email or Skype chat to contact bloggers: Twitter and to a lesser extend their weblogs to see what was happening in their lives to decide when and how to contact; Skype chat to coordinate before the interview start and to exchange links and names during it; Twitter and Skype chat to discuss their preferences for receiving interview summaries; Google documents and email attachments to edit the summaries, email to communicate around them.

Given that bloggers have many tools at their disposal, what are the reasons to choose for or against blogging? While the interviews do not provide enough input to identify such reasons in a systematic way, it is possible to discern a number of weblog characteristics that influence the choice for or against them:

• space to express one’s ideas without pushing them to others;
• slow and open-ended, so not good for direct interaction with a particular goal in mind;
• contextual (at the post level and as a whole as they include a history of the blogger’s writing over time);
• persistent, so are better used for posts that make sense in a long term, not for trivial updates;
• individual-centred, providing history over time, ability not to restrict oneself to writing on particular topics and strong association between blogger and content;
• personal, representing own space and own ideas;
• public, providing a big potential audience, so not well suited for private, confidential or vulnerable writing;
• take time and effort.

In addition to choosing which channels to use when engaging with others, bloggers also make an effort to discover which tools others use, and to connect there. Gabriela says that meeting a new interesting person usually results in searching for them and connecting in different places:

I’ve never seen someone giving me the details [...] you go and see what you can find there. After I attend an event I usually have ten requests [to connect].

Given the number of channels bloggers use to engage with others, maintaining all of them might be a challenge. Luis talks about the risks of “spreading yourself too thin”, since it takes effort to maintain one’s presence on multiple channels.

Another issue to deal with is the fragmentation and aggregation between different channels, especially when they are used, as in a case of Ton, to connect to different audiences. Gabriela is concerned that information about a person that used to be in a weblog is now fragmented across multiple channels, as well as the need to “follow” her contacts to the channels they choose for their activities. However, she is also “a bit annoyed but the fact that social tools are getting more aggregated” and provides an example of her students who started to follow her on Jaiku (used as part of the course), but then turned to other channels (including her weblog) and picked up all kinds of personal details about her.

While at the beginning bloggers connect with each other primarily via weblogs, over time meeting in person and other tools are added to the mix. Bloggers pick and choose tools to engage with others. They also enable those choices by creating connections with others and maintaining their presence on different channels, and by dealing with fragmentation and aggregation of their bits between different channels.

• On knowledge management and learning again
• The best part…
• Blog networking study: establishing and maintaining relations via blogging

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.

***

Blogging provides opportunities for both, building strong personal connections and establishing other, non-personal relations, those that Nancy calls “information relations” and Shawn addresses as “not ties”. While providing an opportunity to “keep an eye on things” (Dave) those relations do not require as much effort and commitment as goes into personal relations. Anoush, reacting to the summary of the interview with Nancy, discusses this aspect in her weblog:

In this interview, Nancy talks about information relationships vs human relationships emerging as a result of blogging. The notion of information relationships is that blogs allow to connect in a meaningful way to a wide range of people and their ideas without necessarily engaging with them on a personal level – as Nancy says “trust in what they are producing, which may have nothing to do with trust in them as a human being”.

I like this concept, and this quote formulates very well what I have been thinking about as the liberating aspect of the sorts of instrumental, utilitarian (in the good sense) social networks that can develop in the blogosphere.

When I think about various types of aggregations of indviduals and knowledge – groups, communities, network, and the collective – I always have a bit of a problem, a sense of discomfort, with the notion of “community”.   For me, “community” – in the social as well as learning-related sense – has always had something oppressive about it, like being stuck in a village where everyone gossips about everyone else and where there is a pressure to fit in, to fully participate.

In contrast, information/knowledge networks you can form in blogosphere do not require such full engagement on such a personal level.  I am not an avid blogger myself (this blog is very new and I am still trying to get into the habit of writing regularly). However, over years, I have accumulated a list of around 50 blogs that I read/scan daily.  In most of the cases, I don’t know the authors personally, and with many of them I have never had a conversational exchange, yet I feel I know them professionally, their ideas have shaped mine, they helped and are helping me every day tremendously to learn and feel intelectually connected and stimulated, not to mention helping me find, filter and evaluate resources for my research (books, papers, etc).

Although Anoush contrasts blogging networks and communities, the function of “information relations” between bloggers is not that different from lurking in communities (Nonnecke & Preece, 2003): they provide an opportunity to learn without the exposure and the effort that interaction requires.

However, there are differences as well. In a community learning through lurking is likely to be about the community itself or the domain that it is focused on. In a case of a weblog readers are exposed to as many domains as the author decides to cover, creating more opportunities for learning across boundaries than possible in a community setting. This learning is also person-centric: observing writing of a single person over time helps to develop trust in “what the blogger is producing” and a feeling of “knowing her professionally”.

• Research on lurking
• Networking: YASNs vs. blogs
• Blog changing way we meet people

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.

***

A closer look at the role of blogging in supporting networking between bloggers indicates two different uses of weblogs in that respect: weblogs are used for publishing and for interaction.

When attracting or finding others, getting to know them from a distance or staying in touch, the roles between blog writers and blog readers are distinct: bloggers write, readers learn from that. The relation is similar to one of a book authors and their audience: no need for reciprocity and direct interaction appear as an advantage, allowing bloggers to write “to the world”, since their readers can pick and choose what to read and what to do with it. The coverage of one’s life and thinking in a weblog is similar to the one of celebrities done by mass media; it helps to learn about the blogger, but does not really help to build a relationship.

When it comes to bonding through interaction blogging is different. During his interview Martin talks about weblogs as “alive, living, published now”, for him “it’s a conversation going on instead of publishing exchange” that gives the feeling that “people are there”. To have such conversation both reading and writing are essential; bloggers and their readers become participants. While some bloggers are more likely to “reach out” than others, once conversation started it is about give and take that comes from all parties involved, reciprocity and direct interaction become essential.

The study results indicate that blogging supports both, publishing and interaction. Blogging as personal publishing is about broadcasting to broad and often unknown audiences allowing efficient communication, while blogging as interaction is about engagement with specific others that builds shared understanding and enables bonding. While those two functions result in positioning blogging as a hybrid genre that has elements of personal webpages and asynchronous communication tools (Herring et al., 2004) I would argue that weblogs might be used as both at the same time.

Michelle Gumbrecht (2004, p. 2) brings the common ground theory to explain how addressing both, close friends and strangers, is possible in a single weblog post. She discusses one of her respondents, Lara, who blogged about “an ongoing personal situation that she needed to resolve, but she never detailed in specific”:

The sweeping generalizations (“I know that everything will work out in the end, because it always does”) and the undefined context of the situation illustrated that Lara believed that her intended audience (probably close friends) knew what she was referring to, she didn’t want to bare all of the facts to the entire Internet audience, or both. The manner in which she framed her post is key to manipulating what is termed “common ground”-the way in which people achieve mutual understanding [2]. Common ground is used generally within the confines of immediate social interaction, but the terminology is applicable here as well. Through accumulation-the manner in which common ground is constructed-Lara and her close friends accrued a great deal of shared knowledge through their previous encounters [4]. By virtue of this knowledge, Lara’s friends would be able to understand her posts without her going into excruciating detail. On the other hand, acquaintances and strangers are privy only to the surface information presented in the post. Without the benefit of shared knowledge and experiences with Lara, they do not have the inside track on her situation. In a paradoxical manner, Lara managed to maintain privacy within a public medium.

In similar way Ton discusses two roles that his weblog play in respect to networking. For people, he is already connected to, it’s a place to think aloud and to reflect, to get to deeper exchanges: “when I write my network is imagined audience”. At the same time weblog is a “gravity pull”, “a starting point for new relations”, that may or may not grow as a result of people stumbling upon his posts.

From this perspective, writing a weblog post allows communicating to both close friends and unknown others. Next to it, viewing blogging as publishing allows writing on “whatever I find interesting” for “whom it may concern”, impossible in direct interpersonal communication, knowing that friends will read between the lines and pick it up when relevant. If others react to a weblog post, it also becomes part of an interaction that contributes to bonding. The power of blogging in respect to networking seems to come from an opportunity to combine two modes with one tool.

• Levels of communication, relation building and weblogs
• Distributed Agile: the black box of co-located team
• Slow reading and knowing questions

This post is kind of related to the blog networking study, but please treat it as not very scientific thinking in a middle of the night. It’s on the study results in respect to presenting oneself through blogging.

One issue that is not really clear there is how intentional is shaping one’s own image through blogging: from one side, bloggers do make choices about if, what and how to write in their weblogs, from another – they seem to let things emerge through their writing.

Weblogs are easily viewed as a space for identity management (re:Goffman) where blogging is a frontstage performance set to impress the audience in a particular way. I feel that blogging is rather a backstage, where you can be yourself, even if it’s in public. Like in this post by Fa Martin-Niemi:

We moved into a new modern flat a few months ago with lovely views of the harbour and ocean.  All I could think about is what we could see.  “Oh, look from this window and this one and the deck…”  What I hadn’t thought about was windows work both ways.  So one day when I was walking home, I looked up and noticed my son’s bed was unmade and he had toys all over the floor.  It took a second before I realised that if I could see this from the road, then so could all of the hundreds of people who walk and drive by our flat everyday.

Now, I am thinking that blogging may be similar.  I love reading good blog posts.  “Oh, look at this one and that.  Did you read the one about…?  Let me send you a link”  So when I created this blog all I could think about is all of the great views I could see.  But of course, this blog like most are public so every word I write can be seen by anyone passing by.  Not just by the friends and commenters who I know about, but also the unknown lurkers who happen upon it.

The funny thing is you get used to it.  I didn’t start closing the curtains when I realised that everyone could see in.  I didn’t even start cleaning.  I just decided that it comes with the territory.  If I want to look out, it means that others can look in.  So with blogging I am not going to close access and change my writing.  In fact, I welcome the casual readers.  Hope you are enjoying it, dirty laundry and all…

In the comments to the post on presenting oneself through blogging there is a discussion on why bloggers in the study post personal details on their blogs and how they might deal with unexpected audiences. My intuition (=did not check it properly with the data) says that it’s more of the discovering over time that “it comes with the territory” – it’s not only ok to be yourself (and personal), it is essentially the thing that brings those unexpected connections that are so valued.

Being yourself (like with good friends) – vulnerable, personal, multidimentional – in public, you meet others.  If weblog is an attractor, a “gravity pull” (Ton) then whatever you project outside “people will appear who appreciate that” (Martin). You start to “chat with people as they were your friends” (Dave) and they eventually become your friends. You start performing, they become an audience.

So, in a sense, performance is counterproductive.

It also takes more effort than being youself, since multiple audiences collide in one space and a performance means you have figure out how to play multiple roles at the same time. And it kills unexpectedness, since the performance defines the audience.

This also explains, why there are so many signs of “it wasn’t intented, just emerged that way” and “if you try to sell via blogging things go wrong” attitudes between the interview lines.

Still, why there is a struggle of how personal a weblog should be? My guess – while you can be yourself with friends, you probably do not want to be naked with all of them and even if you do not mind, you probably wouldn’t do it in a public place.

• BlogWalk: quiet
• Blog changing way we meet people
• On attributing interviews done for my research: the dark side of transparency

I’m still alive, but quiet: struggling to come up with the first draft of the final chapter of my dissertation and preparing for a conversation at SPsquare research and dissertation fest tomorrow. I’ll be talking about some puzzling things in the blog networking study and my current explanations for them.

Slides and some notes are below, but since it’s very much work-in-progress it might be better to join the discussion tomorrow (20:00 GMT, Skype/phone, contact me for the details) or wait till I blog it.

.

Puzzling things:

• asymmetries – see Getting to know others from a distance
• non-personal relations (“information relationships”, “no ties”) – see Dealing with a network expansion and filtering information it brings
• identity management? – see Presenting oneself trough blogging
• crossing boundaries – see Participants and their networks, Finding and being found, Presenting oneself trough blogging

Blog networking

• Finding and being found
• Getting to know others from a distance
• Bonding through interaction
• Getting things done
• Staying in touch

Publication vs. interaction – will add a link when blogged.

I use weblog of Nancy White as an example, so you may want to check it and the summary of interview with her.

Key publications I refer to:

• affinity/commitment/attention
  • Nardi, B. A. (2005). Beyond bandwidth: dimensions of connection in interpersonal communication. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 14(2), 91-130. doi:10.1007/s10606-004-8127-9
• crossing boundaries
  • Star, S. L. & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19(4), 387-420. doi:10.1177/030631289019003001
  • Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press.

• CPsquare foundations: themes and questions to explore
• An argumentation analysis of weblog conversations
• How using (or not) a particular technology influences content of a weblog and social dynamics around it

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. A few specific questions are at the end of this post.
• Statements are linked to the names of people who talked about particular issue, those might be true or not true for others.

***

Weblogs become online representations of their authors, who talk about weblogs as “the core” (Ton), “the record” (Dave), their online presence and a “long-term commitment towards yourself and your personal brand” (Luis), something that continues to represent them as they change (“I can change my job or interests, but the URL will be the same”, Martin). Euan provides an example of the role of blogging in that respect talking about someone he works with who does not have a weblog:

He is using Twitter and some other things… It feels like miasma – I’ve got nowhere I can point people to because he doesn’t got a blog and the other bits are too dispersed. So [the weblog] is like a core, a gravitational pull. (Euan)

The interviews bring several choices in respect to bloggers own presentation through blogging. First, they need to make themselves visible through writing to those they would (potentially) like to reach. Then they shape their writing to address the demands of different audiences that their weblogs expose them to. Finally, they just “let it be”: allowing their “true self” to be revealed through blogging and to be constructed by others.

In order to be present, to exist, bloggers need to be visible to others by writing their weblogs. For Luis the need to start blogging in public came from experiences of blogging internally and his dissatisfaction with a “half-way conversation” with KM bloggers who couldn’t see comments and links from his internal blog. He talks about the need to blog externally to have proper conversations, to become one of KM bloggers, “to build up a community of people to share”, “to help me to position myself as a thought leader within the field”. He says, “[blogging externally] allowed me to have a public face, a public voice”.

For Monica, it was important to be able to put her name on previously anonymous weblog once her authorship was discovered by a journalist and become known in her organisation. She talks about her own practice of checking weblogs of others to find out who they are and dissatisfaction of not being visible in the same way. She also provides an example of a need to become invisible when her former colleagues commented on her presence with them even after leaving the research group (that didn’t support her PhD aspirations), as a result of continuing to blog about her ideas:

I had mixed feelings, so I stopped posting work-related things there. [...] I felt used. (Monica)

However, writing a weblog is not enough to be present as a blogger, it is also important to use the language that potential audience will understand. Gabriela tells about creating a blog in English next to the one she wrote in Romanian to be able to connect to bloggers she met at a conference. Monica and Martin, who write primarily in Portuguese and German as a way to connect with their national audiences, talk about struggles to make choices between languages. For them connection with local audiences comes at a price of being invisible to their English-speaking network that they address once in a while by writing in English.

With a weblog one may be also present to different types of audiences: peers, existing or potential clients, and friends. Relations with those people involve different ways of writing and interacting that do not necessarily coexist well together, resulting in a need to shape the way one is represented by a weblog.

Martin provides an example by telling what led him to stop blogging 1,5 years ago, referring to the dynamics around his weblog as one of the reasons for it. In the German-speaking internet his weblog became “quite famous” and got exposed to a “different sphere of people”, who expected him to “be a pundit who knows everything”. From one side he wanted to play that role as it allowed him to get more business. From another side catering for these expectations in his weblog collided with the open and vulnerable style of blogging necessary for learning and networking with peers. At the certain moment there was too much confusion, so he decided to stop blogging. According to Martin, blogging for marketing purposes “has a different attitude and you get clash of the contexts”.

Even when blogging is supporting one’s business as in the case of Dave, it is important “not to push your ideas”:

if you say interesting things or link to interesting stuff people will come and talk to you anyway (Dave).

In additional to managing tensions that might arise around different professional uses of a weblog, there are also choices about the degree of revealing personal details of one’s life in it. While many respondents emphasizes the blurring boundaries between personal and professional, professional contacts and friends for both business in general and blogging in particular, they also limit the degree of exposing personal details in a weblog. Euan notes that weblogs “rely on you having an opinion and expressing it and it’s not the most easy thing in a work context.” Monica considers many bloggers she knows friends, not professional contacts as she observes the details of their lives that “only friends have a privilege [to see]“, however, she is also not comfortable revealing too much on her weblog: “I will not talk about myself. For me blogging and being in public are the same”.

Given the impact of blogging on one’s reputation it is tempting to think of it as a way to construct a favourable image of oneself. However, the interviews hint that while weblogs may be viewed by bloggers as their online representations, their uses in that respect may not be fully intentional and directed. Not only bloggers comment on networking as a side effect of blogging rather than an explicit purpose for it, they also seem to believe that there are limits of how much their image could be controlled.

For example, when talking about his weblog as a “trustworthy anchor point” for his clients, Ton explains that it works that way “because you can’t fake six years worth of blogging”. Dave, reacting to my comment about his experiences of presenting to big audiences says “keynote is a performance, blog is more intimate” and then tells about being surprised with “the degree you reveal yourself on the weblog”, sharing “half-formed ideas” and starting to “chat with people as they were your friends”.

Blogging under one’s own name as a professional might be one of the reasons not to “fake it” as others can eventually get into a closer contact anyway. For example, Euan tells about the temptation to become “more guarded” to address increasing business risks of blogging when getting self-employed and his decision against it: “it’s better if people know what I’m thinking before starting to pay me”. Martin, reflecting on his experiences says that now he would rather express what he thinks and “people will appear who appreciate that”.

In addition, bloggers are not only “revealing themselves” to others, but also exploring who they are, through their writing and reactions of people to it:

I existed and had a life apart from my existence, just because of the insights I put in the blogs I created… I also discovered things about myself I didn’t know… when more people started saying something about me. (Monica)

One can have a preferred image of oneself as a professional, but readers of a weblog construct their own anyway based on weblog writing, as, for example, with Nancy, who tells about others positioning her weblog as a “KM blog” or “educational blog”, when she doesn’t view it this way.

Participants view their weblogs as their online representations and also shape their actions accordingly. In order to “exist” for the audiences they may want to reach and potential connections to emerge bloggers not only need to be blogging, but also do it in a way connected to one’s name, continue blogging over time and written in a language that the audience can understand. While there they have to draw boundaries of what and how to include in their writing, they also let their image to be shaped by their writing and their audiences.

***

This is the part of the results that I’m most unsure of, so any comments are welcome. If you are a blogger I’d love hear how much what I say here is true for you personally.

Things that are not covered here, but would be interesting to discuss as well:

• how “my blog is my online identity” works for people with multuple blogs and mainly contributing to a multi-author blog
• how bloggers deal with addressing multiple topical audiences of their blogs – are there any struggles there?

I’m also thinking about this whole issue in respect to identity management and playing with a couple of ideas from Goffman (giving vs. giving off via the weblog, weblog as a backstage), so if you are into those things I’d love to talk.

• Tagging four things
• You can’t participate in life via conference call: media vs. pace
• Martin Roell

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.

***

By providing an easy way to find and connect to interesting others, weblogs accelerate expansion of one’s network and increase the volume of potentially interesting information flowing through it. Nancy discusses how expansion of networks as a result of blogging creates a need to make choices: “if you choose to follow what blogging network exposes to you may accelerate expansion of the network and then you have to make choice how much to keep up with that”. Not only it is difficult to have a big number of meaningful connections that extension of one’s network brings, but it is also that “relations that these tools enable do not scale” (Euan). Contrary to offline relations that often fade as shared context disappears, weblog-mediated relations “do not go away” as the context and the interactions are “there” (Ton).

One way to deal it the challenges of a growing network is to limit its expansion. When discussing that she does not make as many connections now as when she started blogging Monica suggests that she is “not looking” for more people to connect:

…may be I have enough friends now. Like after getting married, you are not looking anymore. (Monica)

While not necessarily setting limits on a number of new connections, bloggers use the opportunity weblogs provide to get to know others from a distance to informed choices about those they want to engage further. Caution about the degree of engagement with new people is especially visible with Nancy, Euan and Dave, who had extended professional networks prior to starting blogging:

There are in a modest way more people who want to talk to me than I want and can talk to. So I have to manage that. (Euan)

I can’t afford the time to meet everybody I track or listen to. (Dave)

There is no way I can have a relation with everyone who has something important to say about the things I’m trying to learn. (Nancy)

Another way to manage network expansion is choosing not to connect personally with other bloggers. Nancy talks about “information relationships”: not engaging with people at a personal level while still having a meaningful interaction, as well as “trust in what they are producing, which may have nothing to do with trust in them as a human being”. When I try to discuss it in terms of weak and strong ties, she addresses this distinction as insufficient to describe the relations around artefacts that do not necessarily engage the person.

While others do not use the same term they often distinguish between weblogs of people they know and others that they read to monitor particular topics. For example, Dave says that some of weblogs he reads “just to keep an eye on things”, without engaging at more personal level. Shawn mentions not having any connection with some of the authors of the weblogs he subscribes to: “the majority are weak ties or not ties, 5% strong ties”.

Even when not engaging personally with all authors of interesting weblogs, the amount of potentially available information might be overwhelming. Bloggers deal with it by reading weblogs they follow selectively. Some participants describe elaborate strategies for using their networks to scan and filter information for them. For example, Dave has “about fifty science bloggers” in his reader – “they scan journals for me, so I don’t have myself”, “I’ve learnt to trust them over the years”, “it’s much better than summarisation surface”.

Ton is watching “two-three hundreds people” via their online traces and such monitoring what they are doing and writing gives him a “sense of what’s going on in the world” (he stopped reading newspaper and watching TV). He adds that those interactions are different from those with strangers on the street, as he knows the context behind what people write. He is primarily interested not in specific information, but the patterns in it, so he deals with an extendedness of his network by “taking a helicopter view” and then “diving deeper” when he has specific questions.

While not all participants describe such strategies, most of them talk about scanning through their subscriptions, not reading everything (“I read what I can, but I don’t feel bad if I don’t read everything”, Brett) or even not reading at all (“mostly I open new items just to see the bold disappear”, Monica). Some explicitly talk about not being afraid to miss important information and relying on their network to bring it to their attention:

If it’s important it will come back (Gabriela).

People will keep talking about it and it will come to me via different paths (Ton).

Relying on the network to make sense of what is happening in the world bloggers explicitly search for a diversity of topics and points of view in what they read. For example, when I ask about the risks of being in an ‘echochamber’ of likeminded others found through blogging, Euan tells that he likes to “be provoked to think differently” and selects weblogs accordingly. Although he admits that it might be a personal trait, he suggests “you can still choose to be in an echochamber, but it’s easier to choose not to be” as there are so many choices.

Bloggers deal with the expansion of their networks and the information it brings in multiple ways. They choose to limit the expansion by not connecting with new people or engaging in depth. Some of their connections could be described as “information relations”, where weblogs as sources of interesting information rather than as a way to connect personally with their authors. Bloggers manage the information that weblogs bring by reading them selectively (scanning, looking for patterns or not reading at all) at the same time maximising their exposure to a variety of perspectives and trusting that the network brings back what they might miss.

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