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

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

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

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

Now to what you can do:

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

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

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

• A Brief Overview of the Linguistic Attributes of the Blogosphere
• Weblog as an easy way to stay in touch
• Re-reading my own weblog and research blogging

Last night I had an impulsive wish to try out my wedding dress. Next to the pleasure of realising that it still fits, the experience brought lots of thoughts and feelings.

Of course, it brought the memories of the day (actually days, since we celebrated twice, in Russia and in the Netherlands) and the strong feelings behind it as we did a little dance in a living room.

However, as soon as I put the dress I also remembered that I actually planned to wear parts of it on more occasions, but never looked around to find matching pieces to turn it into something that doesn’t resemble the original look and never looked for an opportunity to wear a new combination. Which is pity, since I loved the dress and the idea of wearing it more than once.

As my mind started to work in that direction, I found that I already had the matching pieces (so I tried a combination immediately) and the occasion (so I discussed it with Robert and even thought of a matching outfit for him).

And then, of course, I saw a parallel to the PhD chapter that I’m currently working on and a discussion how the past, captured in my weblog comes back to live, gets combined with other bits and becomes part of the future…

• My Friday 5: bloggers I’d love to meet
• Blogging about disabilities
• Once more on blogging and writing

As a result of having less time to blog and increasing stress levels my blogging routines went broken:

Then I started blogging I loved it. Reading others brought all those unexpected insights and relationships that improved my work dramatically. However, it also brought heavy information overload that I wasn’t prepared to deal with. Having many (more than I could ever imagine) bits of potentially useful insights with no immediate way to process them made me feeling stressed and lost. I am a bit better now, but it’s still not working well and I still envy Ton who not only wrote about need for new information processing strategies, but also figured out how those could work for himself (check his posts on filtering, tools and routines).

The social filtering mechanisms of weblogs and content delivery by RSS feeds are usually praised for their efficiency in allowing keeping up with many information sources, in my case a weblog-induced information overload became a reality. There are a few reasons for it:

Growing network. A relatively small circle of early-adopters writing about knowledge management and learning exploded over time, as more smart people started to blog.

Multidisciplinary blogging. My blogging reflects my interests in bridging multidisciplinary boundaries, so while I started mainly on KM and learning, it eventually turned into “personal productivity in knowledge-intensive environments, weblog research, knowledge management, PhD, serendipity and lack of work-life balance” and lots of other topics. Over time this got me into a contact with a diverse group of other bloggers.

RSS overload. There were periods of 1000+ subscribers to my RSS feed, but even without trying to keep up with all of them my weblog reading list grew to more than 200 weblogs and was a challenge to keep up.

Need to converge. Expansion of my weblog network and growing amount of potentially useful information coming through it came at the moment where my dissertation ideas started to converge. At that moment reducing information intake and the degree of engagement with others was essential for processing emerging insights and integrating them into a bigger whole. Reducing time spent reading other weblogs reflected at micro-level the suggestion to “stop reading and start writing” often given to PhD students struggling to incorporate recent publications in their work.

While the withdrawal from frequent and engaged blogging was a reflection of my personal and work circumstances at that period, the main challenge was adjusting my (blog-related) information processing strategies and habits. I can imagine that at a better moment I would be able to do it, but then I was simply trying to keep up and eventually gave up: I just stopped reading blogs systematically.

In turn, writing suffered:

• Since I wasn’t reading others, writing was stimulated mainly by my own thinking and work. Although I can’t check it fast, I can imagine that the amount of outgoing links dropped dramatically.
• I wasn’t seriously following on the feedback of others on what I wrote, so potential conversations died at birth. I can also imagine that for others it was less interesting to link and to comment to someone who wasn’t very responsive.
• At the end writing wasn’t much about engaging, but more about just putting things “out there”.

When Radio stopped working in January 2008, it was easy to take an extended break from blogging (additionally motivated by the fact that it was a natural point to “freeze” weblog archive to analyse it for my dissertation).

• Not bloging, identities and Happy New Year :)
• Blog as a way-back machine
• RSS Winterfest: Robert Scoble

Matthew Hurst on the most important blogs for efficient readers:

A group of researchers at CMU have been considering a notion of blog importance based on how likely a set of blogs is to ensure that you will be informed of topics bursting in the blogosphere. By analogy, they consider a graph of water pipelines. Their paper – Cost-Effective Outbreak Detection in Networks Leskovec, Krause, Guestrin, Faloutsos, VanBriesen, Glance – poses the problem:

Given a water distribution network, where should we place sensors to quickly detect contaminants? Or, which blogs should we read to avoid missing important stories? These seemingly different problems share common structure: Outbreak detection can be modeled as selecting nodes (sensor locations, blogs) in a network, in order to detect the spreading of a virus or information as quickly as possible.

As a result of this work, the authors have published some blog lists which answer a fundamentally important question in terms of weblog reading habits: Which weblogs should I read to be most up to date? The lists answering this question – generated by the approach described in their paper – come in a number of varieties to be found on the project’s page.

I scanned (skipped most of the math :) through the extended version of the paper and this is something I would love to see applied to niche blogging networks. For example, starting from a subset of weblogs that mention topic X or, better, those that participate in a discussion (cascade) that mentiones topic X.

A few points relevant from the practical perspective – having a tool that helps a blogreader to make a selection of blogs to read (my expectations in that respect are pretty high given that Natalie Glance is working for Google now :)

1. “Costs” of reading. The authors played with optimising the number of blogs and number of posts one reads. Assuming that reading less blog posts is more cost-effective, the algorithm shows that “the popular blogs might not be the most effective way to catch relevant information cascades” (p.23). Instead, it makes more sense to read “good summarizer blogs that may not be very popular, but which, by using few posts, catch most of the important stories propagating over the blogosphere” (p.15).

2. Predicting the future. From a reader perspective one would like to have a recommendation of blogs that will cover most interesting stories in the future. From what I understood the algorithm does not work that well for making those predictions. The authors optimised the performance by including only big blogs (= at least one post per day), but I wonder if there are some other alternatives.

Anyway, I guess I should go back to my PhD writing and wait patiently till people who read the paper without skipping the math do something with it. So far I’m happy that the paper promises lots of interesting developments and that it also makes me feeling less guilty with our alternative approach to vaccination by suggesting that “uniform ummunization strategy corresponds to randomly placing sensors in a water network” (p.22), which in not optimal :)))

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/14.html#a1953; comments are here.

• How to become part of a blogging ecosystem?
• AOIR: Finding ‘the life between buildings’: An approach for defining a weblog community
• Writer’s block :)

I often catch myself with an uneasy feeling when people talk (write) nicely about my weblog and treat me as an expert as a result of what I write here. Of course, it feels nice and rewarding, but it’s uneasy: sometimes while writing another “struggling with PhD” or “raw thinking in progress” post I really wonder why I still have all those smart people subscribing to my feed.

It’s difficult issue to talk about: I don’t want to get compliments or try to be too modest or something like that. It’s not that I think that my ideas are worth nothing or that I have nothing interesting to say – I don’t think I’m a novice in the areas I write about, but there is something uneasy in putting my own self-image next to how (I think based on the feedback I get) others perceive me.

Last week, while talking about those things between all other topics with Stephanie and Jill I’ve got one step further, realising that I actually wrote about it before and that I have conceptual categories to think about it. When I worked with Andrea on a book chapter (will post a version online very soon) co-constructing a story of our relationship we discovered exactly the same asymmetry of perceptions:

At the beginning of the relationship Andrea’s comments were carefully shaped, indicating respect of Lilia’s position (‘a proper researcher’, not a ‘mere student’), experience in blogging and assumed expertise. For Lilia this degree of ‘being treated as an expert’ felt strange.

Reflecting on this difference we found it useful to distinguish between writing as knowing and writing as learning.

Our experiences with written (especially academic) texts taught us to perceive them as a representation of authority and expertise of their authors: writing on a topic as an indicator of confident knowledge about it. For Andrea reading Lilia’s blog posts about online research shaped an image of her as an expert on the topic; Lilia had the same (but not explicitly expressed) respect for Andrea’s knowledge of ethnography.

However, our own self-images did not correspond to these perceptions: we were still exploring the respective fields using weblogs to documenting those learning experiences. Blogging as learning, very formative, uncertain and in-progress was perceived as blogging as knowing – summative and confident.

For me my weblog is a learning diary – things that appear here are pretty much thinking in progress and me-who-writes-this-weblog is a struggling PhD researcher, who has more questions than answers. It seems that me-whom-people-imagine-while-reading is a bit more of an knowledgeable expert, confident enough to present even unfinished ideas to the world. Of course, I’m a bit of both – in offline world I would adopt different roles (identities?) while discussing specific difficulties of data analysis with my mentor or while presenting finished piece of research at a conference.

It’s just uneasy and interesting to look how the way (I think) I present myself in my weblog is different from how (I think) others perceive me while reading it – I haven’t experienced much of it offline…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/28.html#a1822; comments are here.

• Too many RSS feeds
• Mangrove effect: the value of making things explicit
• I’m not a potato :)

Via Alex Halavais – experimental engine predicting the demographics for a given search query or URL from Microsoft.

My results are different from those of Alex – according to it people viewing my weblog are females between 25-34 years old…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/06/28.html#a1788; comments are here.

• Too serious?
• Effects of reading someone else’s feeds
• Time to reflect: my uses of weblog

It’s feels strange realising how much my PhD research is influenced by experiences in domains that don’t have much to do with my focus. Since it’s so strong I tend to think that it’s true for other researchers as well and then feel even more strange not finding much traces of those “other domains” in their published work. This, in turn, reinforces my feeling that there is always some degree of “constructedness” in research published – and the more rigorous and logical it looks the more I suspect that the logic was reverse-engineered (no offence meant – this is how I feel even if logics says the opposite :)

Anyway, back to the originally intended topic of this post… Now, getting back into my PhD research and deeper into sorting out methods and methodologies, I realise that my recent reading of Third culture kids (context) provided me with a frame for thinking about my research next to insights of more personal nature.

Between other things the book stresses the influence of growing up between cultures for forming TCK personalities and the world outlook. While we are growing up, our identities are forming against particular cultural backgrounds – specific norms, values and practices are picked up, tried and tested, and, regardless of their “stickiness” in our lives form who we are (you don’t need to drink vodka to be Russian – in anyway your attitude regarding it would be heavily formed by observing those who do, knowing about effects of it, rituals and “safe” good practices of drinking as well as having to deal with the “outsiders” who think that it’s a bigger part of everyday life than it actually is ;). Background culture provides scaffolding by consistent stimulators and reactions. This consistency is important – it’s like a tree that always there for an ivy to crawl around or like a firm arm of your dance partner that is necessary to lead in a way that could be followed.

Growing up between cultures means that another life could be just one flight away, and then everything is changed – the way elders are treated, food is prepared and eaten or friendships are formed. Relocating while growing up means that there is sufficiently long time to absorb each culture, but not enough to be formed by any specific one… Those culture changes bring not only broad outlook on the world, flexibility and knowing exotic languages; they also turn someone into restless and rootless, someone who is always in transition, moving, but never settling, someone who doesn’t know who he is and where he belongs.

Reading the book made the difference clear to me – despite of a few years living abroad I grew up Russian and know where my roots are. In my case multicultural values and practices, although landing on a fertile ground of growing up in a family of mixed ethnic origins, are still just add-ons to the pretty stable core.

However, being mixed up and searching for own people is part of my life – in a totally different context. I feel as “third culture kid”, restless and rootless, research methodology wise.

I guess there are two reasons to it. First, it is doing research (and being enculturated methodology-wise) in a multidisciplinary research institute rather than being a part of a university group with clear set of norms, values and practices regarding research approaches. The second has something to do with weblogs.

Some time back we played with an idea of blogging as distributed apprenticeship, articulating own practices and learning from others often transcending time, distance and disciplinary boundaries. For me blogging has been exactly that – an opportunity to lurk and learn, going beyond expertise and practices available in my immediate surroundings.

Now it bites back. For me reading weblogs of researchers coming from contexts very different from my own brought a permanent exposure to “other” research cultures while I’m still trying to figure out what are the norms and practices of my own tribe (and what is my own tribe, by the way?). In this respect I feel like a kid who moves between different cultures while growing up. I know a lot about differences, fascinating local examples, needs to adapt and to speak the right language, but I don’t know where I belong and which values to stick to. I know that whatever research paradigm you are in the consistency is important, but sometimes I wonder if I can find it wondering in my own kunstkamera* with bits and pieces of research from other worlds…

* Here refers to Kunstkamera in St. Peterburg, founded as a collection of curiousities by Peter the Great and later turned into an ethnographic museum.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/14.html#a1738; comments are here.

• Lessons learned from a large-scale K-logging implementation
• Bloggers cited in the dissertation
• Diablog by Jon Hoem

12/34. 12 hours by train in 34 hours – some sleep, first gluntwine this year and lots of talking in between :)

Somewhere between Frankfurt am Main and Köln I detach myself from the book I’m reading and look around. Upper shelves are packed with black cabin-size suitcases; seats under then are packed with dark suited businessman. They look strange – not reading, not sleeping, not clicking around through emails – just sitting and staring into nowhere. I wonder if they are jetlagged or just spend the day negotiating big deals…

I go back to my book. It’s a collection of interviews with travel writers, A sense of place, by Michael Chapiro. I picked it up in January, when we traded beaches of Waikiki for coolness and coffee of Barnes&Noble. It was patiently waiting for me – till last week. Since then I was steeling a bit of time here and there to dive into it. Fortunately this trip is long enough to let me do all of that – watching people, reviewing reports, sending kusjes and being able to savour the book slowly as food in a good restaurant.

I enjoy this book – the themes – home and being far away, crossing borders and cultures, writing, being insider and outsider, facts and fiction. And the style – close and somewhat intimate conversations, asking very knowing questions coming from reading travel narratives that may be reveal more about their authors than about destinations.

As usual I start seeing parallels with my own work. Thinking of absorbing details of others’ lives from their weblogs, sense of connectedness and somewhat intimate knowledge about them – and interviews that could touch themes and go to the depths not possible otherwise.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/11/17.html#a1707; comments are here.

• ECSCW07 workshop on social software – Employee blogging: personal or work-related?
• Studying weblogs at Microsoft
• Blog changing way we meet people

What I really want is RSS reader that would allow me tagging feeds – folders do not scale anymore :(

May be it exists, but I’m suffering from not knowing – tell me then…

And, since I’m here – my ideal feed reader would*:

• be web-based synchronised with desktop client (so I can read feeds offline as well)
• let me read password-protected feeds
• let me tag feeds – no folders any more!!!
• have “remember” link under every post, creating a subset of posts per feed that I’d like to remember – and it wouldn’t be the same as “keep new” of Bloglines that screws up the whole idea that number of unread posts indicates posts
• have “add to del.icio.us” link under every post (I don’t want to use “remember” link for that – those I posts that I’m not able to categorise yet)
• let me track conversations (the data is there – one more step please)
• let me specify/switch between views:
  • for some feeds I like full-text view, for others headline view
  • sometimes I like to see posts per feed, but for some feeds I’d like to read together, mixed in a stream (something I miss from Radio newsreader experience)
  • sometimes I want to see new posts, sometimes all posts, sometimes only those in “remember” category
  • could be great to have “conversations” view – to see not posts per feed, but posts per conversation
  • could be great to have “what my friends read” view (thinking of NusEye + more) or use tags from other users…
• given all flexibility about views – I’d like to be able to specify which of them (does not) influence read/unread status
• let me share my subscriptions as a plain list without tags (because I don’t feel comfortable letting people know how I categorise them)

* I’m using Bloglines now, so this refers to my experiences with it (= may be considered as “how to improve Bloglines” as well :)

See also my posts and bookmarks on blog reading

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/08/30.html#a1649; comments are here.

• Several RSS feeds into one?
• How many abandoned Bloglines subscriptions are there?
• Weblog audience: how to you find your own?

Riccardo redefines social pressure:

We are used to think of Social Pressure as that feeling of “I have to do more” to stand up with the expectations of others.

Today I experienced another kind of Social Pressure, the one being imposed by your expanded social network on your attention/focus.
Let me explain:
I read on Kottke‘s that an explosion caused massive power outage in Moscow.
Normally this would go totally unnoticed. But today something different happened: the words “explosion” and “moscow” rang a bell. My mind ravaged on a query for “is there anybody you know who could be in Moscow now?”.
Of course yes.
Next query was “May she actually be there?” and, yes, I remembered reading something about that, and I had this sensation she hadn’t blogged in a while.
A quick check confirmed these feelings.
The fact I couldn’t find her on IM made me worry even more. All these well knowing the nobody were injured or whatever, that’s funny.

Fortunately, there are no reasons to worry – I’m back :) I was in Moscow during the outage, but spent the whole day at a workshop in the Northern part of the city that went unaffected (although the high temperatures were raising even more with hearing the news). And – to be fair – I was pretty happy that for the last few days there I moved from my sister’s apartment in the South to my parents’ place – she told me her story of dark shops, people storming buses or giving up and walking along the street.

Anyway – I’m more or less back (travelling a bit more for a few coming days).

And I loved how Riccardo puts it concluding the post:

Anyway, the point is that having a large social network actually imposes an higher attention degree on what goes on worldwide, and in a sense can make you listen to and be sympathethic with topics you’d never noticed before.

This is pretty logical, but still feels strange – your main focus is still more or less on things you do and people around you, but your peripheral vision extends to far away world…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/05/27.html#a1578; comments are here.

• Too many RSS feeds
• Time to reflect: my uses of weblog
• Blog networking study: dealing with a network expansion and filtering information it bring