In case you are reviewing the chapter on blogging PhD ideas – below is the part missing in the discussion section of the draft (as a bonus you can see how the post from yesterday turned into something more academic :)

***

While study of a single blogger is not representative for all knowledge workers who blog, the findings presented in this chapter correspond to personal accounts of other bloggers discussing uses of their weblogs for organising own thinking (Doctorow, 2002; Halavais, 2006; Mortensen & Walker, 2002; Pollard, 2003), publications discussing how weblogs could be used that way (Edmonds, Blustein, & Turnbull, 2004; Paquet, 2002; Peña-López, 2007; Todoroki, Konishi, & Inoue, 2006) or how contextual factors shape blogging in an organisational environment (Walker, 2006). Studies of work-related blogging suggest that weblogs serve as a ‘trigger to elicit passion for knowledge’ (Kaiser, Müller-Seitz, Lopes, & Pina e Cunha, 2007) and are used as a reference archive to support working on a document (Carter, 2005) by knowledge workers in other settings, however they do not provide an in-depth view of the activities behind those uses.

The literature on personal information management allows comparing the findings to existing research at a more granular level. The synergies between using weblog to collect and organising ideas and uses of those in supporting specific tasks are similar to those described by Erickson (Erickson, 1996) in the case of personal electronic notebook. The possibility of a feedback in a case of a weblog provides an additional motivation to contribute, however, writing in public also results in limitations on what could be written that do not exist in a case of a personal tool.

Although at the first sight using weblog as an online knowledge base calls for comparison with digital collections created by other tools, I find more parallels with the studies that look at information represented by the paper artefacts on desks and in personal archives (Bondarenko & Janssen, 2005; Kaye et al., 2006; Kidd, 1994; Whittaker & Hirschberg, 2001).

For example, the type of information included into my weblog and the role it plays in developing ideas echoes the discussion of the role of the paper on the desks to support knowledge work in the study by Kidd (1994). According to this study, spatial layout of papers in the office serves as a holding pattern for the ideas that knowledge workers “cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use”, as a primitive language that reflects models of the world still being constructed, as contextual cues to recover the state of their thought after an interruption and as demonstrable output of the progress (Kidd, 1994, pp. 187-188).

Not being tied to specific tasks and bounded by expectations and format of a bigger document, my weblog allows including dormant information and capturing ideas under construction. Flexible categorisation provides a way to replicate the spatial arrangement of documents on a desk: chronological archives, tags and links allow “piling” entries together and indicating relations between parts of emergent mental structures. While contextual cues around a weblog post do not support returning to an interrupted task in a way as the layout of papers on a desk does, they play similar role helping to recover a state of mind at the moment of writing the post, which is useful when returning to an idea that has been “parked” for a while.

Finally, the public nature of weblog gives others an idea of the work in progress similar to the papers on one’s office desk. In that respect, a weblog bears more similarity to one’s office room than to one’s digital spaces: as a personal space that others could visit as guests, weblog serves social functions of sharing resources, building a legacy and impression management similar to the paper archives (Kaye et al., 2006).

While existing publications and feedback on this study from other bloggers suggest that more bloggers use their weblogs to organise and develop their thinking, more research is needed to explore frequencies of those uses and the conditions stimulating them. In that respect, the view of blogging as an experience of flow states (Kaiser et al., 2007) provides an intriguing starting point.

A particularly interesting research direction would be exploring connections between a task at hand and specific blogging episodes: how much and in what cases blogging is used to “park ideas” and when it directly contributes to one’s work on the task. Since those connections are too infrequent for an observation and difficult to reconstruct from memory or content of a weblog post, the best results are likely to be acquired in a diary study (for example, by inviting a blogger to fill in post-specific questionnaire immediately after publishing a post, as in Carter, 2005).

The connection between the functionalities of weblog technologies and their uses for personal information management needs further examination. The similarity between the roles of weblog to support my work and those of paper collections in other studies indicate a need to explore the affordances of weblog technologies from PIM perspective and possibilities of learning from blogging when designing other tools. Finally, the potential for learning from information accumulated in one’s weblog calls for a development of tools allowing to explore patterns in those traces that aimed at bloggers themselves (supporting what Pousman, Stasko, & Mateas, 2007, call casual information visualisation).

References

• Weblog conversations revisited: conversations with self vs. conversations with others
• Ideas turning into actions: BlogWalk and more
• My definitions of a weblog

Thanks to a colleague I went rereading the paper I now automatically cite in my PhD work – Alison Kidd’s The marks are on the knowledge worker. Between other things she talks about the importance of the spatial layout and materials for knowledge workers, discussing a number of roles that the mess of papers plays.

What I find striking is the parallel between those roles of the paper spatial arrangement and my uses of the weblog.

As a holding pattern

It seems that knowledge workers use physical space, such a as desks or floors, as a temporary holding pattern for inputs and ideas which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use [12]. Filing is uncomfortable for the because they cannot reliably say when they will want to use a particular piece of information or to which of their future outputs it will relate (p.187)

Weblog provides as much structure as I want to. Posts that are easy to categorise get “filed” into specific tags and categories, but the rest is just “piled” in the chronological archives with fuzzy or no tags and may be some linking. What is nice compared to the paper that a post can sit in multiple piles (and files) for the same time (see Whittaker & Hirschberg, 2001, for more on piling and filing).

As a primitive language

It also seems that knowledge workers may use pieces of paper or the marks on them as a material correlate of a model of the world which they are in the process of constructing in their heads. (pp.187-188)

All those “thinking in progress” posts, fuzzy tags and linking often represent bigger emergent structures that are not ready to be articulated as a whole.

As contextual cues

The layout of physical materials on their desk gives them powerful and immediate contextual cues to recover a complex set of threads [...] (p.188)

With weblog is different: these cues (context in the text, links and tags) are not those to recover a  state of mind before before an interruption, but rather at the moment of writing the post. However, it plays similar function, allowing to get back to a task at hand at a particular moment.

As demonstrable output

Piles of papers on desks are also important as tangible objects to which workers can point to show others how much progress they have made. (p.188)

Well, this should work if you can get those who evaluate your work to read your weblog :) But in any case, for everyone else it does show the thinking in progress (see also Kaye et al, 2006 on the roles that archives play).

• Why blogging 2
• How do I search my weblog?
• HT09: Weblog as a personal thinking space

One of the directions that keep on popping up when I’m thinking about blogging in KM context is topic-based blogging. There are a couple of reasons behind it:

• personal - if blogs are used as a personal knowledge management tool than ability to tag posts is important to be able to organise, retrieve and share them
• corporate – once weblogs are used in a company one would want to be able to slice an aggregated stream of posts into topic-based streams to support knowledge sharing

liveTopics and k-collector are good examples of personal vs. corporate implementations (see also: liveTopics and k-collector compared) and del.icio.us is an example of connecting personal and shared views on topics together.

In this post I’d like to focus on personal side and describe what topic-based blogging functionalities one may want as a blogger. And because I’m very practical and selfish I’d describe it as my liveTopics wishlist :)

What liveTopics do now

• allow adding topics for every weblog posts – e.g. check this post via browser
• display a list of posts per topic – e.g. my posts about liveTopics
• display topics as a frequency list or recently updated list – e.g. my topic index
• provide an interface for managing topics (renaming/deleting + backup + some settings)

My liveTopics wishlist

• Printing
  • I’d like to be able to print posts for a topic or combination of topics (so far I can think of AND/OR combinations, but may be I’d want more once related topics are there ;)
• Aggregation
  • Topics indication in my RSS feed (e.g. in ENT format)
  • RSS feed for each topic (ideally for a combination of topics as well :)
• Related topics
  • Indication of a relation (below are different overlapping! dimentions)
    • Automatic vs. manual
      • Automatic: based on co-occurences in the same post – e.g. related tags for innovation at k-collector or del.icio.us
      • Manual: added by me to indicate how topics are related in my head – e.g. I’d like to be able to specify that blog communities is a narrower than communities, but also related to blog ecosystem
    • Internal vs. external
      • Showing that my posts on blog communities are related to my del.icio.us link collection on blogCommunities
    • Me vs. others
      • Showing that my posts on innovation are related to post on innovation at k-collector
  • Inference
    • Once relations are there one can do all nice things with inference rules.
      • For example automatically including narrower topics when broader topics are selected, e.g. when someone selects communities posts on blog communities are shown as well even if they are not explicitly marked that way
• Visualising
  • Dynamics
    • I’d love to see how my use of topics changes over time; something similar to temporal rhythms of interactions with others visualised from email arhives
  • Relations between topics
    • Just a nice image :) Something like delicious mind
• Small liveTopics/Radio specific things
  • Shortcuts for topics added automatically
  • Expanding of posts by topic in topic index pages

Of course, I wonder how many of those things are “nice to have”/”Lilia specific” and which features would be used by many blogger, but this is a “further research direction” as I’d write in a paper :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/10/13.html#a1384; comments are here.

• How to start blogging?
• KMSS02: Day 5. Methodologies and technologies for KM
• Feed your blog to tOKo and see what comes out

At last BlogWalk I was trying to explain my ideas about ideal wiki/weblog tool, so just writing them down.

I wrote about blogs and wikis for thinking earlier, so just in brief on what is important for me:

• process – weblogs are good to keep track of ideas unfolding; datestamp and preserving the original are important
• outcome – wikis are good for (collaborative) working on integrating, refactoring and connecting ideas
• connection between these two is essential – I’d like to see how bits of weblog posts turn into something more tangible

What my ideal wiki/weblog tool should do:

1. Weblog. Usual one. The only thing I need is something like liveTopics to add keywords to each post. Keywords should not be predefined and shouldn’t behave like categories in Movable Type or Radio multiplying content: I need only an index that allows retrieving posts by a keyword (e.g. blog reading).

2. Linkblog. Something as easy as del.icio.us, with only one difference: when I add a keyword the link is added to the same keyword index as weblog posts (so, my posts about blog reading and links on blog reading are indexed on one page).

2.n Ideally I could have other types of logs – e.g. file log, e-mail log, reference log, book log, recipe log. Same: keywords and joint index (with an opportunity of switching indexing off for sensitive stuff).

3. Wiki. Here all the fun starts. When I post something to my weblog or any of other logs it’s added to two places: keyword index (see above) and keyword wiki page. This is the time when I want the software to multiply my content: I’d like any new post about blog reading it is automatically copied at the end of wiki page called blogReading”. Then I (and others) can do all the usual wiki stuff – editing wiki page making a whole from posts there.

If I add new wiki page, new keyword is added to my keyword index. If I rename a keyword then everything gets renamed and reindexed.

4. Keyword indexes (see above) – list of keywords that leads to keyword wiki pages and keyword indexes (and, of course, these two are linked).

5. Keyword (concept) maps. At least three of them: (1) visualising connections between wiki pages; (2) visualising connections between weblog posts based on co-occurrence of keywords in the same post; (3) integration of the two. All organised as webs (not trees :)

6. RSS feeds of every page (especially indexes, so people can subscribe to a keyword).

7. (just dreaming ;) Time-travel machine that keeps track and visualises changes in weblog posts, wiki pages, keyword maps.

That’s it. Should not be that difficult given existing technologies. Even time-travel machines do exist. The only thing which is not in this picture is access rights (e.g. blogging to the world, to a group, to yourself). Have to think about it.

If you have a tool that integrates 1-6 I would switch to it.

This post also appears on channel BlogWalk

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/06/08.html#a1233; comments are here.

• Wiki as a data collection instrument
• Experiences of using del.icio.us
• K-collector links and questions

I’m still disconnected. I’ve learnt a lot about DNS these days, especially that it takes ages to get your domain name back once it switched off. I don’t think I will forget to pay my domain name costs another time :)

So, what do I miss:

• searching my weblogs for ideas and references when I need them
• feeling that there is someone to listen when I write and hit “Publish”
• looking for follow-ups of my posts and tracing emerging conversations
• sending people my weblog link as an addition to two-lines intro

I feel disconnected and invisible, like I don’t exist anymore. I know this is not true, I do exist, I enjoy autumn sunshine and I’m happy to reply to all the worried messages saying that it’s just a technical problem and my weblog should be back. Still, writing this and knowing that it will not go in the air feels like trying to speak and realising that no word can reach others (thinking of the moment in The Matrix when Neo tries to speak and his mouth disappears).

Anyway, autumn sunshine is still here, back to work and be patient…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/10/28.html#a813; comments are here.

• New Bloglines
• Comparing weblog text to the PhD dissertation via tagclouds
• Blogs to improve writing

Just a brief thoughts about my ways of finding something in my blog:

• If it was recently I scroll
• If I remember the date and it’s not too far from now, I use calendar
• If I know the words I used before I use Google search on my site
• If I can recall it by seeing its title I use All posts by title archive
• If I can recall associated theme I use liveTopics (I don’t use categories anymore because they break RSS feeds)

Otherwise I get lost. No, in fact if none of these works I assume that something I’m looking for wasn’t in my weblog, but somewhere else on-line.

I wonder how my readers search my weblog…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/22.html#a688; comments are here.

• Beyond ‘blogs = easy webpublishing’ (2)
• Radio Userland: what I love and hate about it
• BlogTalk: who owns narrated experiences?

I realised that I can’t wait to answer why do I blog? :)

I always need a conversation for growing my ideas. This is the main reason I blog. Even if no one comments, blogging makes it a conversation: I come to the idea next day and I can discuss it with “yesterday’s Lilia” :) Of course, articulation helps growing ideas as well.

Another reason to blog is to make some free space in my memory: I can easily come back to it later. The Social Life of Paper says it well in describing the use of paper by air-traffic controllers:

By writing on the strips, they can off-load information, keeping their minds free to attend to other matters.

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?”

These were the reasons to start blogging. Later I discovered other great things:

• blogging builds my own (customised! :) network of like-minded people without almost any effort from me
• it is great for filtering links
• it improves my English
• it gives me a better face on-line that any profile I could think about (it allows googling me as well)
• it’s easier to search than any other “notes” I make
• more nice things in the story about blogs in research by Sébastien Paquet

I post when I feel like it (often) and when I have time (not always). Sometimes I don’t post things I’d like to because of confidentiality (something internal) or copyright reasons (blogging conference if presenters are not aware of me blogging). I hope that those two problems will be solved soon with conference blogging becoming usual and my work to encourage internal blogging pilot :)

And finally, as “David” says:

blogging is like a loving sexual relationship – you just do not realize how rich and rewarding it is until you have experienced it

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/10/30.html#a311; comments are here.

• Why weblogs are rarely used to document research?
• Klognet links
• Innovation with