Behind my PhD research is an interest in translating practices of early adopters of weblogs into something that those that come after them might use: an understanding of relative advantage of blogging in knowledge-intensive environments and it’s compatibility with existing practices. Below is another piece from the final chapter of my dissertation, the one where I draw the implications of my findings for an individual knowledge worker, a pragmatist, who wants to know what blogging might bring for him in order to decide if it is worth the effort. [There is also a piece on facilitating weblog adoption, probably tomorrow]

Wondering how far it makes sense: would you show it to a colleague thinking about starting blogging?

***

Is blogging for me? Why? What do I need to know before trying it out? Although answers to these questions should be specific for each particular person considering blogging, this section might provide a starting point for formulating them. Here I outline the characteristics of weblogs that make them useful for one’s work and the changes in working practices that blogging might require.

Switching gears

Flexibility is a main characteristic of blogging tools: weblogs allow to “switch gears” using them for communication on a variety of topics in a number of ways.

In most cases weblogs are used as personal tools. Unless intended to be used for a very specific purpose (e.g. to communicate to customers about a product) or within a very restricted environment (e.g. in prison*) one can use a weblog to write on personally interesting issues in a personally meaningful way. However, since weblogs are public, it is useful to think about them as one’s front garden: it’s up to the owner to decide what should be in there, but general cultural norms do apply (e.g. cursing might prompt neighbours to take another street to walk).

As a tool weblogs might be also used in different modes. Publishing to a broad and often unknown audience is what weblogs are primarily known for: one can use weblog tools to make particular piece of information available to others without pushing it to them. In addition to that weblogs could be used for conversations with self and interaction with specific others.

Uses of a weblog for conversations with self are up to an individual blogger: a weblog can serve as a tool to collect personally relevant notes and organise them in a variety of ways; this collection then provides an input for reflection and reuse.

On the other hand, weblogs could be also used for an in-depth interaction with others, allowing to build relations and trust and to develop ideas in dialogue with one’s contacts. Weblogs are not perfect as a conversational tool: there is no guarantee of a reply and once a conversation started it might become fragmented between multiple weblogs. When topics and people for conversation are known it is better to choose other tools, however, blogging works well as a conversation starter since others could choose topics that interest them.

Enabling work

Blogging might fit one’s work when some elements of it require publishing, conversations with self or unexpected interaction. For example, it might replace email for sharing news with a team, be used for documenting one’s work to reflect on it over time, or to find out who might be the person to discuss a problem.

However, in many cases the open-ended and public nature of weblogs does not make them a good tool to do one’s job directly; in those cases their strength is enabling work by developing ideas and relations that might be needed in a future. Weblogs are about microcontent: writing and reading in small bits does not require much effort, so blogging might fit in moments between other tasks. In addition, a weblog post does not have to communicate a specific idea to a specific audience, so weblog might work well to collect notes that do not fit anywhere else. Over time, this collection of thoughts provides an overview of one’s ideas and expertise, enabling unexpected connections across boundaries.

Weblogs are probably most useful in settings where one doesn’t know what is waiting “down the road“. Which of the current ideas might be needed for a future project? Who is the best person to ask for help? What jobs I never thought about I’d love to do? In those cases weblogs help to build a foundation: to collect ideas “just in case”, to grow a professional network, to make one’s expertise and passions visible.

Emergent social

While weblogs support publishing and interaction, an audience for it does not come automatically; it emerges through discovery and interaction over time. In addition, while it’s easy to “place” an email into one’s mailbox, it is impossible to make others to read a weblog. What does it mean in practice?

• Writing needs to be enticing; readers come when a weblog adds value for them. A good way to do so is to write on the issues one is knowledgeable and passionate about.
• Bloggers discover each other through comments and recommendations. Taking effort to find interesting bloggers and commenting to their work is a good way to be found. Engaging with people who comment to one’s own weblog, tracking who is linking to it and following links from one’s favourite weblogs are other ways to get into contact with bloggers.

It takes time and effort before one can enjoy social effects of blogging. To sustain blogging before those effects appear it is important to have a personally meaningful way to use a weblog. For example, while documenting ideas about work might result in finding like-minded people in the future, it is easier to carry on doing it knowing that doing so is useful even if nobody appear to be interested (e.g. as a reminder of one’s activities for a progress report).

A learning curve

It is relatively easy to learn how to use blogging tools. However, productive uses of weblogs in relation to one’s work require another type of learning: personal nature of blogging, as well as visibility and boundary crossing that it brings might challenge one’s existing working practices. Blogging is likely to bring cultural shifts to be addressed and lessons to be learnt**:

• Personal passions have a legitimate place at work. Personal stories and voices turn into trusted relations. People are more likely to believe another human being than an organisation or a computer. Showing emotions, telling personal stories, being passionate in hierarchical environments could be a challenge, but it is becoming an essential part of work.
• Transparency is here to stay. Weblogs provide a visible, often public, trace of one’s expertise, actions and mistakes: what is written may stay “out there” forever and be searched, aggregated, transformed and linked back to the author. When there is no way to escape one’s past, it is essential to learn how to make mistakes in public and how to handle them gracefully.
• Visibility can turn into information overload. Being visible as a weblog author might extend one’s reach, but may also bring an unexpected explosion in communication as a result. With its low threshold for online publishing, blogging brings into public spaces ideas and stories previously hidden in private collections. Blogging requires reconsidering one’s routines of working with information in order to be able to deal with fragmentation and abundance.
• Everyday routines matter. Unless one has nothing else to do, blogging survives only if integrated into the everyday world. Starting a blog is easy, continuing requires more – embedding the activity into one’s information routines, work processes and interpersonal practices.
• 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.
• Organisations might set the rules and create conditions, but at the end it’s up to an individual. Making judgments, taking risks, taking responsibility. Crossing boundaries. Having fun.

From the reality of working in an “average” business environment the challenges that have to be addressed to make blogging work might look like too much trouble to deal with. Before that scares you, it is important to take into account that they also reflect some of the broader shifts in the nature of work, so embracing them as a result of blogging might help preparing for those.

***

* I keep wondering if “prison” is too irrelevant in this context (it comes from a story of blogging from prison told by Bev Trayner :). May be I should use something more business-specific, like an example from a company that should stay unnamed where super-secret R&D researchers started blogging.

** Yes, you’ve seen it before: ‘Beyond blogging’ lessons learnt.

• Weblog as a research notebook (3): my own experiences
• Knowledge networker
• The power of loose ends (3) or the weakness of weblogs when it comes to joint actions

This is a piece from the current version of final chapter of my dissertation where I discuss blogging across various boundaries.  It draws heavily on the conceptual categories from the work of Etienne Wenger on communities of practice (Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity, 1998) and on the discussion with CPsquare members about those.

***

While blogging might provide a window onto practices of the blogger, on a surface weblog is just an artefact: text, links and bits of other media. In this post I reflect on the ways blogging helps to cross boundaries through information exchange and non-personal connections, using the concept of boundary object as a starting point. This concept was introduced by Susan Leigh Star (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star, 1989), who used it to describe how practices of different social worlds are coordinated:

Boundary objects are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds. (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 393)

My original interest in using the concept of boundary objects in respect to blogging comes from the term itself (weblog is an object that works across various boundaries), so my treatment of it deviates from the way it is usually used. I use it to refer to an object at a boundary of different perspectives that include those of an individual, rather than to an object at an intersection between social worlds (Star & Griesemer, 1989) or communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). In addition, boundary objects are defined through their use for coordinating different perspectives (for example, this point is emphasised by Wenger, 1998, pp. 107-108), while in the case of blogging coordination between perspectives is often an accidental side-effect, rather than intentional.

Those differences might warrant the need to introduce an alternative terminology, however I leave it for further work and focus on parallels between boundary objects and weblogs: artefacts-based connections between different perspectives that do not require personal engagement and characteristics that enable those connections.

Contrasting the role of boundary objects in crossing boundaries between communities of practice with brokering, Wenger emphasises that artefact-based connections “can transcend the spatiotemporal limitations inherent in participation” (Wenger, p. 110), since artefacts can travel easier than people, however, uprooted from specific practices, artefacts are also a source of ambiguity and misinterpretation. Studies, presented in my dissertation show that weblogs have a potential to connect different perspectives without requiring personal engagement. For example, readers of my weblog pick up bits of the research relevant for them; KM bloggers use weblogs to establish information relations next to those of more personal nature. The Microsoft case provides a view on how far information can travel via weblogs, as well as an idea of challenges of misinterpretation it can bring.

Based on the different types of boundary objects described by Star (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star, 1989), Wenger proposes a number of characteristics “enabling artefacts to act as boundary objects” (Wenger, 2001, 107):

1) Modularity: each perspective can attend to one specific portion of the boundary object (e.g., a newspaper is a heterogeneous collection of articles that has something for each reader).

2) Abstraction: all perspectives are served at once by deletion of features that are specific for each perspective (e.g., a map abstracts from the terrain only certain features, such as distance and elevation).

3) Accommodation: the boundary object lends itself to various activities (e.g., the office building can accommodate the various practices of its tenants, its caretakers, its owners, and so forth).

4) Standardization: the information contained in a boundary object is in a prespecified form so that each constituency knows how to deal with it locally (for example, a questionnaire that specified how to provide some information by answering certain questions).

Those characteristics are useful to view what enables weblogs to serve as connectors across various perspectives.

Modularity and standardisation are inherent to weblogs: blogging is about bits of microcontent (weblog posts), connected within and across weblogs by standardised structure and protocols. When finding a new weblog, those familiar with the medium, know how to deal with it (e.g. distinguish specific posts and their metadata, browse through the archives or subscribe to the updates). Specific weblog posts, accompanied by permalinks, can be accessed without the rest of the weblog. This allows information presented in a weblog to travel far outside of the original contexts where it was created.

The potential of a weblog to accommodate various activities is not immediately obvious: on a surface it is an instrument for low-threshold publishing that allows reaching broad audiences without pushing information to them. However, the results of the studies presented in my dissertation suggest that it may also support conversations with self and interactions with specific others (more on publishing vs. interaction, conversations with self and conversations with others).

A combination of those three modes supports accommodation for various practices of different constituencies. An individual blogger might use weblog for a conversation with self – articulating thoughts and feelings, organising own digital bits or reflecting on the traces left over time in retrospect. Publishing makes one’s weblog traces exposed, so others can learn from them without necessarily engaging directly with the blogger. On the other hand, weblogs could be also used for interaction and engaging in-depth, allowing to build relations and trust and to develop ideas in dialogue with one’s contacts.

Finally, since multiple perspectives are served at once, weblogs also exhibit a degree of abstraction, for example, when specific details of one’s work or personal situation is omitted to make possible sharing the essence in public and knowing that the author himself or those “who know” can read between the lines to reconstruct missing details. Abstraction also makes information presented in a weblog accessible and relevant to broader and varied audiences, while also increasing a chance for misinterpretation.

In sum, while not necessarily fully fitting in a definition of a boundary objects, weblogs exhibit characteristics that make them effective in establishing artefact-based connections across boundaries of different social world.

• Theories/Practices of Blogging in Reconstruction (Vol. 6, No. 4, 2006)
• Shout if you want to be heard or Technorati blog finder
• Studying weblogs at Microsoft: connecting the dots

This is a piece from the current version of final chapter of my dissertation where I discuss blogging across various boundaries.  It draws heavily on the conceptual categories from the work of Etienne Wenger on communities of practice (Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity, 1998) and on the discussion with CPsquare members about those.

***

While to an extend weblogs do represent bloggers behind them and are often perceived as their online identities, studies presented in my dissertation also indicate that blogging involves many challenges of dealing with different audiences that a weblog serves (the results of blog networking study provide examples of both). Blogging in a context of knowledge work requires balancing interests of self and others, peers and customers, close friends and occasional lurkers, or those of people coming from different disciplinary backgrounds. From this perspective I find useful the discussion of identity in relation to participation in different communities of practice by Etienne Wenger (1998, p.159):

Our various forms of participation delineate pieces of a puzzle we put together rather than sharp boundaries between disconnected parts of ourselves. An identity is thus more than just a single trajectory; instead, it should be viewed as a nexus of multimemberhsip. As such a nexus, identity is not a unity but neither is it simply fragmented.

• On the one hand, we engage in different practices in each of the communities of practice to which we belong. We often behave rather differently in each of them, construct different aspects of ourselves, and gain different perspectives.
• On the other hand, considering a person as having multiple identities would miss all the subtle ways in which our various forms of participation, no matter how distinct, can interact, influence each other, and require coordination.

The notion of nexus adds multiplicity to the notion of trajectory. A nexus does not merge the specific trajectories we form in out various communities of practice into one; but neither does it decompose our identity into distinct trajectories in each community. In a nexus, multiple trajectories become part of each other, whether they clash or reinforce each other. They are, at the same time, one and multiple.

When one belongs to different social worlds, being a one person requires what Wenger discusses as reconciliation, the process of constructing an identity that can integrate “different meanings and forms of participation into one nexus” (p.160).

Although usually participation in different social worlds is somewhat separated in time and space (e.g. being a colleague at work and a parent at home, while still maintaining a single identity of a working parent), blogging brings it into a single space and sometimes even into a single moment, when a blogpost is written to capture one’s experiences between those worlds (for example). In this case different forms of participation collapse creating a living resolution of a boundary. In addition, the work of reconciliation, usually very personal and invisible (p.161), leaves publicly visible traces when bloggers use their weblogs in different contexts.

Wenger discusses participative connection across community boundaries as brokering, which is defined as “use of multimembership to transfer some elements of one practice into another” (p.109):

The job of brokering is complex. It involves processes of translation, coordination, and alignment between perspectives. It requires enough legitimacy to influence the development of a practice, mobilize attention, and address conflicting interests. It also requires the ability to link practices by facilitating transactions between them, and to cause learning by introducing into a practice elements of another. Toward this end brokering is provides a participative connection – not because reification is not involved, but because what brokers press into service to connect practices is their experience of multimembership and the possibilities for negotiation inherent in practice.

While brokering is not necessarily an intentional activity of a blogger, the co-existence and reconciliation of different perspectives in a singe weblog might results in accidental brokering. In this case elements of practices are transferred across boundaries as bloggers address conflicting interests and translate between different perspectives through their writing – not because they planned to do so but since this is what being able to write in a single weblog requires – providing their readers with an opportunity to “visit” practices different from their own.

In this case weblog provides a window onto practice, supporting learning trough legitimate peripheral participation as it allows “to look through it onto as much actual practice as it can reveal, to see to increasingly greater depths, and to collaborate in exploration” (Brown&Duguid, 1992, for more see Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks). Access to practices of others in this way requires time and effort of picking up contextual cues “between the lines” and establishing relations needed for joint exploration. However, weblogs also provide an alternative way to peek into other worlds that does not necessarily requires the effort of engaging in person, but rather allows connecting through artefacts.

• MILK: multimedia interactions for learning and knowing
• AOIR: my selection of papers
• Blogademia – weblog research blog by Scott Nowson

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.

• Notes on my PhD methodology: weblog studies
• Weblog conversations revisited: conversations with self
• Meeting imaginary friend

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

• Personal side of social media: learning from weblogs
• Weblog audience: how to you find your own?
• Weblog and paper blind review

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…

• More research questions about blogs
• Shout if you want to be heard or Technorati blog finder
• Between bloggers and their employers (2)

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 :)

• Bloggers as public intellectuals and writing about them in a research report
• Transitivity of blogging
• Ideas turning into actions: BlogWalk and more

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.

• Too serious?
• PhD invasion
• Nominated for Edublog Awards :)

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.

• Third culture kids and research kunstkamera
• Weblog research: artefacts and practices
• Weblog research: artefacts and practices – and contexts that influence them

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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