Mathemagenic

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 :)

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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

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Last week I’ve got a comment on the draft chapter that got me stuck. In the study I describe my uses of weblog to develop dissertation ideas using meta-blogging posts from my weblog. As a result the section tells how this happens and from the comment it became clear that I also have to show it. Which is pretty tricky.

How do you show how ideas grow? I think as a reader of a weblog you just see them unfolding and connecting over time and, if you see a product that comes out as a result, you can often pinpoint traces of those early ideas and emerging connections. But how do you show it to someone who doesn’t have that experience, ideally in a condensed, easy to digest way?

Given what I know about visualising blog (and other) data I can think of nice visualisations of terms, tags and links over time, but I also know how much effort creating those visualisations requires.

I tried an easy route - looking at Wordpress plugins that could show anything over time based on my weblog archives. Interestingly, while there are many of them to track external statistics (visits, referrals, most popular posts, etc.), there are hardly any to do it for the weblog itself. GeneralStats, that “counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, tags, link-categories, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages”, is one exception I found, but even it does not show, for example, numbers of weblog posts per category per month.

All of this is a bit sad. Not that much because it gives me a headache thinking about editing the chapter, but mainly as lack of tools to see patterns in one’s own weblog shows lack of demand for it…

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About a year ago I looked for Tools to find similarity between two texts (weblog and papers) - I wanted to find a relatively objective way to judge how much of my weblog writing ends up in the dissertation.

Between other things I experimented with generating and comparing tagclouds from texts that were supposed to correspond to each other. I tried several tools, but ended up with tagCrowd since it allowed using generic and custom-made lists of stop words.

As an experiment I used text of five dissertation chapters (draft versions as of April 17, 2008) and the text of blog posts coded as corresponding to those chapters to generate a visualisation of most frequent words in each case. After removing stop words (general English plus those from my own list that I was stupid enough not to save) 65 most frequent words are visualised.

For example, two tagclouds below are those from the blogposts related to the Microsoft study and the draft chapter with the results of it.

In total I had 5 pairs of visualisations. I then mixed them and asked five people familiar with my research (supervisors and collaborators) and eight students (taking a class with Anjo) to find matching pairs. The results are below.

Some comments:

• I guess there is a connection between PhD chapters and blogposts :)
• The high score for the methodology chapter is explained by its qualitative difference from the rest of the dissertation.
• The low score for this chapter is explained by the fact that the coding of weblog entries in relation to chapters was done prior to writing it. As a results it included many “might be relevant” posts, while for other chapters the focus was more clear. In addition, the draft version of the chapter used to generate the visualisation was the first draft, while in other cases those were revised several times.

It was nice to see that although many of the visualisations looked similar (with blogging and weblog being big ;) it was actually possible to match the pairs. But the nicest thing was simply making all those pictures, laying them on the floor and thinking that I actually had some version of 5 chapters out of the 7 :)

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Back from Online Information. Hopefully I will find energy to post on all kinds of insights from it once I’m done with the introduction chapter that was patiently waiting for me. Only one thing before that - various conversations at the conference helped me to formulate what I want to do when I’m done with my PhD:

• studying specific cases of Web2.0* in companies (what people are actually doing with those tools and why)
• and then translating insights from those to
  • introduction/facilitation/governance strategies
  • technology requirements

Not that far from what I’m actually doing with blogging in my PhD research :)

*The main reason I want to study Web2.0 is that the values behind it and the change it brings at a workplace correspond well with what I believe in. Technologies will come and go, but some of the lessons they teach stay - it’s those that I’m curious to discover.

Technorati: OnlineInfo2007

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/07.html#a1963; comments are here.

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

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Things that I’ve learnt from blogging that are relevant for ‘beyond blogging’ contexts and cases. I’m looking mainly at an intersection between blogging and work, since this is where my research and personal blogging experiences are.

[I did a "KM-flavored" version of this in my presentation yesterday, but I guess it's relatively easy to draw organisational implications for most of the points.]

Personal passions have a (legitimate) place at work. Personal stories and personal voice turn into trusted relations. Passion drives expertise. People are more likely to believe another human being than an organisation or a computer. Showing emotions, telling personal stories, being passionate could be scary (especially in a hierarchical environments with power plays), but it is becoming an essential part of work.

Transparency is here to stay. Weblogs provide a visible, often public, trace of one expertise, actions and mistakes. There is no way to escape the past, one is always accountable. It’s not easy to write knowing that it is stays ‘out there’ forever, that it will be searched, aggregated, transformed and then linked back to you. We have to learn to let go the fear of making mistakes in public and learn how to make mistakes gracefully.

Microactions aggregate. Blogging is about microcontent - publishing small pieces of thought and commentary, anchored with permalinks and carried away by feeds. However, the real value is not at the post level - ecosystems between blog posts are more interesting and more important. Think of the fuzzy feeling of knowing someone from reading a weblog over time, implicit understanding of a new issue that emerges while following a conversation between bloggers or sense of belonging to a network of others - in all cases posts and links are only a tip of the iceberg. Counting and measuring those visible traces is tempting, but knowledge, reputation, relations are likely to escape rankings.

You never know where new connections emerge, but you can create right conditions. And then be prepared to discover your own ‘connectivity limits’ :)

Information overload exists. There are millions of blog posts out there - some of them are relevant and reliable, but most extraneous, incomplete and not interesting anyway - so how do we find those to read, to trust, to connect? Information overload exists, but mainly inside our heads. The world have changed from information scarcity to information abundance, but our habits and information strategies still have to adjust to it.

Everyday routines matter. Unless you don’t have anything else to do, blogging survives only if integrated into everyday world. Starting blogging is easy, staying blogging needs much more - embedding into one’s own information routines, work processes and (inter)personal practices, as well as transforming blogging routines when life takes another turn (like becoming a parent ;).

Authority becomes fluid. Formal hierarchies are still there, but blogging provides alternative routes. However, new blogging authorities are only as good as posts on their homepages, networks constantly evolve and anyway the share of attention one gets is more and more mediated by search engines (that might drop your valuable archives from their index :)

At the end it’s up to you. Making judgments, taking risks, taking responsibility. Crossing boundaries. Having fun.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/14.html#a1954; comments are here.

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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.

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Had a nice opportunity today to update my Dutch and my knowledge of KM research in NL at KM day “Made in Holland”. Hopefully will blog a bit more tomorrow, but these are some resources in relation to my talk on blogging and KM.

Slides: .ppt

What was in the talk (so you don’t have to check it if you saw some of the things already):

• Highlights from Microsoft employee blogging study
  • Efimova, L. & Grudin, J. (2007). Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging. Proceedings of the Fortieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press.
• Personal vs. business dimensions/choices
  • Blog posts 1, 2, 3 + ECSCW’07 talk
• Implications for KM
  • I should blog it soon.See ‘Beyond blogging’
    lessons learnt for a starting point.

Also:

• Author-centred vs. topic-centred blogging

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/13.html#a1952; comments are here.

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[From draft version of methodology chapter for my dissertation, slightly adapted for the web]

Since weblog research presents a variety of (disciplinary) approaches, there is no single way to define blogging practices. A good place to start is the blogging practices framework by Jan Schmidt (2007), which is based on ideas of structuration theory (Giddens, 1984) and integrates well findings from a variety of blog research studies:

Based on ideas from sociological structuration theory, as well as on existing blog research, it argues that individual usage episodes are framed by three structural dimensions of rules, relations, and code, which in turn are constantly (re)produced in social action. As a result, “communities of blogging practices” emerge—that is, groups of people who share certain routines and expectations about the use of blogs as a tool for information, identity, and relationship management.

[It makes sense to go to Jan's paper and to look at the framework at this moment :)]

Although I don’t apply the framework directly in my work (partly due to the fact that it has been developed towards the end of my research), it serves well as an introduction to the complexities of blogging practices.

Blogging tools and their uses

The relations between blogging tools and their uses are dynamic. From one side, software features enable or restrict certain actions. Rebecca Blood illustrates it well in her essay “How blogging software reshapes the online community”, describing how introduction of permalinks and comments changed conversations between bloggers (Blood, 2004). The differences between functionalities of different blogging tools sometimes results in development of blogging practices difficult to compare. For example, in his analysis of linking between bloggers Marlow (2006) separates LiveJournal weblogs in a separate cluster, since “because the security and structure of a Live Journal blogs is considerably different than others”. This concern is well supported by qualitative researchers, who also report that people using this platform often do not perceive their journals as weblogs (Kendall, 2007), confirming the risks of taking technology-based definitions of blogging without questioning them (boyd, 2006).

The influences also work in the opposite direction – developers of blog software constantly adapt to emergent uses with supportive functionalities. For example, when tagging support was introduced by Technorati beginning of 2005, many blogging tools had followed by providing functionalities to support categorising weblog posts with tags. Resulting adoption of tagging changed ways bloggers categorised their own content and provided additional ways to find bloggers with similar interests.

Although blogging technologies are not in the focus of my research, I take into account the ways they restrict or enforce particular blogging practices. For example, the choice of dataset for analysing weblog conversations was influenced by the introduction of tagging described in the previous paragraph.

Social context of blogging practices

There is an on-going debate in the weblog research community on how social weblogs are. From one side, a randomly selected weblog shows limited interactivity and seldom links to other weblogs (Herring et al., 2004). From another, there is growing evidence of social structures evolving around weblogs. This evidence ranges from voices of bloggers themselves speaking about social effects of blogging (e.g. Mehta, 2004), to studies on specific weblog communities with distinct cultures (e.g. knitting community in Wei (2004), or goth community in Hodkinson (2006)), to mathematical analysis of links between weblogs indicating that community formation in the blogosphere is not a random process, but an indication of shared interests binding bloggers together (Kumar et al., 2003).

The framework by Schmidt (2007) reflects the views of weblog researchers who believe that “the boundaries of blogs are socially constructed, not technologically defined” (boyd, 2006: 36). It suggests that blogging practices are shaped by the networks of a blogger as a well as shared norms that emerge over time in those networks (e.g. being a member of Knitting Bloggers NetRing requires certain frequency of posting and focus on knitting according to Wei, 2004).

Blogging networks are not evenly distributed and often not easily found. For example, as randomly selected weblog is not likely to be well connected with other weblogs (Herring et al., 2004), the chance of discovering a network of bloggers by extracting linking patterns heavily depends on a subset of weblogs and time frame selected for an analysis. Blogger networks may have visible boundaries (e.g. NetRing for knitting community described by Wei, 2004), but more often indicators of social connections are subtle and difficult for a non-member to distinguish. In contrast to other online communication tools (like chat room or forums), there is no single space to observe social ties between bloggers. Rather, relations are formed in a space between weblogs, similar to social activities that emerge in public spaces between buildings in a city (Efimova et al., 2005). This creates difficulties in defining the boundaries of a weblog community one wants to study.

Also, since there are difficult to find, blogging networks with rich distinct cultures may escape the view on blogging practices represented in the media. A good example is provided by an anonymous reviewer of my study of weblog conversations (Efimova & de Moor, 2005), who stated that the study findings are “so unlike the blogging that everyone else has written about that I’m not sure where the authors are coming from”. This comment helped me to understand the importance of studying “niche” blogging practices and the risks of broad generalisations .

Blogging episodes over time

Although factors that shape a particular blogging episode might be relatively easy to distinguish, it gets more complicated once blogging practices are considered at the level that goes beyond single episodes. As boyd (2006) argues, weblogs are both medium for an expression and by-product of such expression. Words of a weblog posts written with particular intentions in a context of a specific blogging episodes “build on the top of each other under the same digital roof” (boyd, 2006: 29). As fictional characters with distinct personalities limit writers in their choices to make them believable, over time a weblog raises certain expectations (e.g. in respect to content, style or frequency of posting), forcing its author to take them into account.

The similar logic holds for weblog uses: while single weblog posts might serve specific situated goals, the uses of weblog as a whole are framed not only by the sum of those “local” goals, but also by the accumulated effects different blogging episodes had over time.

Although, the distinctions between micro-level of blogging episodes and their aggregation into blogging practices over time are useful conceptually, it does not help much with data collection. For example, knowing that asking “why have you started a weblog?”, “why did you write this post?” and “why do you blog?” may yield different results, researchers would have to make the distinctions clear for a respondent. As in my research I’m not studying the micro-level dynamics of blogging, I usually combine in a single category stories about specific blogging episodes, their effects and more general statements about weblog uses.

More than writing

Blogging practices are not only about writing one’s own weblog. For example, Schmidt (2007) distinguishes between selection, publication and networking rules that correspond to different role of a blogger (reader, author and networker, respectively). Another example is the figure outlinining blogging process as envisioned by Dave Pollard [go to his post to look at it]. He also writes, introducing it:

For some bloggers, just writing is enough. For most of us, though, we’re looking to the blogosphere to provide us with useful and interesting information, education, entertainment and/or inspiration for our writing, and feedback, a critical audience, and help with the creative and publishing process.

For my own research, I prefer to keep an open definition of blogging practices that includes activities and issues present because one is blogging. This might involve not only reading or writing weblogs, but, for example, explaining one’s manager why blogging wouldn’t harm the company, going an extra mile to finally meet another blogger face-to-face or figuring out where blogging fits in personal GTD approach.

References

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/09/30.html#a1946; comments are here.

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Gabriela did a great job getting me into ECSCW07 workshop What is missing in social software? via Skype and Yugma. I would prefer to be there in person, since the most value from events like that comes from networking between the sessions, but I guess it will take a while till we can experience it in technology-mediated ways.

I talked on dimentions of employee blogging (1, 2, 3), the slides are online - Employee blogging: personal or work-related?.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/09/24.html#a1944; comments are here.

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