I go to Nancy’s blog to look for the Pear & Cranberry Chutney recipe to cook for tomorrow and then remember that I have a blog too and that it had been silent way too long. So here I am :)

The truth is that I feel a bit like a caterpilar in a cocoon – hiding from everyone and in a process of a transformation. I never thought that I would think of stopping blogging here – so much this blog was me. What I didn’t realise is that identities change or, to be more specific, some of those many identities in each of us take leading role for a while. Or, to be even more specific, I didn’t realise how much my professional identity was leading in my life. Untill I stopped working :)

Letting go professional identity gave time and space to all others that were also in me, hidden. It’s an interesting process to reflect on – letting go parts of your old life to give space for new things to emerge. And scary at times (enough not to write about it :)

As for the online writing – it feels funny to see how social media is getting picked up by lots of people I know and, at the same time, not to have much of the need to do it myself. I do write online – under a different nickname, mainly private and in Russian. Somehow that fits better what I need now (and helps building very different networks). Hopefully writing in Dutch will come as well (as I need it too), but I’m not there yet.

So, what I’m busy with now? All things “green” and local, sewing, house and kids, as well as alternative educational modes. There are a lot of things to write about there, although I’m not sure anymore that this blog is the right space for it (well, if you want to hear about my compost worms let me know :). The last topic would fit pretty well here, but at the moment writing about it feels a bit like writing about internal corporate issues while being employed there – it’s a thin line to navigate and I’m not there yet.

I do miss many of you with whom I connected via this space. Unfortunately letting go work also means that lots of shared activities and shared spaces where you connects with your network go to the background. So, I just send all of you my best wishes for the coming year – strength to go out of your comfort zone and time to enjoy life :)

• Private, public and selective sharing
• PhD as jigsaw puzzle
• PhD recovery plan

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

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

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

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

• Trust in weblog conversations
• Weblogs are not about informing, they are about engaging
• Networked identity

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

• PhD blogging and paper writing
• Addicted to RSS and more about context
• Can I have tags instead of folders with my RSS feeds as well?

Another piece from my dissertation that might be interesting by itself. In the study of my logging practices (Chapter 3) I looked at my weblog from two perspectives: focusing on its uses as a personal knowledge base (using insights from the research on personal information management to identify those) and the ways it supports the process of growing ideas over time (awareness and articulation, sense-making and turning them into a product). The table below matches those, summarising how different stages of idea development are supported by the activities around the weblog content: low-threshold creation of entries; a flexible and personally meaningful way to organise and maintain them; opportunities to retrieve, reuse and analyse blog content, and to engage with others around it.

In case you need a proper citation – this is a slight variation of the table that appears in my dissertation (p.87) and HT09 paper (p.296).

• PhD blogging and paper writing
• Talk at IBM: Blogging for knowledge workers
• Mathemagenic in 2004: 329 pages

Judith Olson in HCI remixed (my sneaky reading when I don’t want to do any PhD writing):

But for me, probably the most important filter on whether or not something is interesting is to tell someone the story. This is a variation on the old saw, “I don’t know what I think until I hear what I say.” In the act of telling the story to someone else, you attempt to frame it in its most interesting surprising way. And, then by seeing the reaction, you can tell whether it is truly interesting or not. (p.232)

That’s why blogging as a way to write research works for me – it’s telling stories to someone else.

I spent half a day  “jumping between dissertation and wordpress since I don’t know where the piece I want to write should go first” (twitter). Finally wrote it as a dissertation section. Decided to blog – and then immediately saw where it has to be revised. Remembered the quote from last night’s reading. Had to write this post.

• Affectionate writing reduces cholesterol
• Withdrawal from blogging: broken routines
• Time in blogging: writers time and readers time

Blogging PhD research and what happens next – presentation (an attempt of zen :) for the panel “New modes of scholarly communication: blogs, wikis, and web2.0 in academia” at Berlin 6 Open Access conference, November 11-13 2008, Dusseldorf, Germany.

[Video of the presentation]

In the talk I decided to talk about my experiences of blogging research to make it as relevant as possible to other researchers, so I focused primarily on connections between it and the process of growing ideas and turning them into a publication. It doesn’t give a good overview of blogging in respect to research methods and methodologies (some readable insight on it is here).

Links for more background on parts of the talk:

• Process of growing ideas: from fuzzy feelings to finished results
• Fuzzy ideas: awareness and articulation
  • Things that don’t fit
  • Blogging as creating space for important
  • Reasons for using weblog to keep information bits
• Sense-making
  • Mangrove effect: the value of making things explicit
  • PhD: experiential research and everyday grounded theory
  • Weblog and the mess of papers on my desk play similar roles in supporting my work
• Turning into an outcome
  • If most of the things I want to say in my PhD are already in my weblog, what’s the added value of the dissertation?
• Issues related to doing networked research
  • Blogging research: attribution and ownership of ideas
  • Bloggers as public intellectuals and writing about them in a research report
  • Paper: Blending blogging into an academic text (it discusses blogging from a methodological perspective; relevant in this case for the discussion about research quality issues and ethical challenges of studying bloggers)

I know it bugs for being turned into a readable paper. Will work on that after finishing the dissertation (soon, submitting first draft as a whole in three weeks!), but any comments on where it makes sense to publish is are very welcome.

• Explaining ‘why’
• Discovering your passion
• Refactoring in the backstage

Referrer logs bring me to the post on high-stakes reflection (mirrors, maps and masks) by Jen:

One of the things I found really fascinating in the e-portfolio literature was Barrett and Carney’s idea of ‘conflicting’ or ‘competing’ paradigms: ‘positivist’ (product-driven, performative, externally assessed, based on externally defined outcomes), vs ‘constructivist’ (process-driven, reflective, learner constructed outcomes) (2005, p7-8). These are also sometimes described as ‘map’ and ‘mirror’ portfolios. [...]

Then I became interested in the extent to which the tension between these ‘conflicting’ paradigms might in fact be an intrinsic part of professional reflective practices. [...]

To describe this, along with ‘map’ and ‘mirror’, I have added a third category: portfolio as ‘mask’. I’ve been working on this metaphor a bit over the past few months and am delighted by its richness – so far I’ve identified at least 6 (overlapping) genres of mask: protection, disguise, performance, memory, transformation, punishment.

This post, together with the one detailing the six mask genres, provides metaphors to think on some of the comments I’ve got on the PhD chapter that looks at blogging PhD ideas. Part of the struggle I had while working on it was drawing the boundaries between the different perspectives I use to look at blogging ideas, (knowledge base / process / context). Although the metaphors do not easily fit onto what I have written (they are also more appropriate for someone looking at blogging from the outside), but they do provide an input for reflecting on it.

The mask metaphor (read the post on six genres) is an interesting one to look at the blogging in the context of my PhD research. Here a quick look on the genres in respect to my weblog research-wise (reordered):

• Memory (trace in the second post) – literally, to keep traces of my thinking.
• Performance / disguise – presenting myself through writing, intentionally and not.
• Punishment – being shaped by the mask, the traces I leave via blogging and the image that others construct of me.
• Transformation – what happens with the ideas as they have been blogged and with my own identity as I go through the process (re: Kamler&Thomson, 2005).
• Protection – the choices I made in bringing blogging back into the dissertation as an instrument to address methodological challenges (a bit here, but more in the paper I’m supposed to write instead of this post). [Update: finished paper - Blending blogging into an academic text]

• KM metaphors?
• Environment vs. personal choice? (re: attribution and ownership of ideas)
• Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research

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…

• How to become part of a blogging ecosystem?
• Weblog as a networking instrument
• Life offline (.ru)

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).

• Don’t tell me how to blog
• Transitivity of blogging
• Escaping categories

Trying to get back to “normal” blogging now it’s interesting to look back and to reflect on what happened with my blogging routines over last couple of years. The graph below provides an overview of a number of weblog posts I wrote per month between June 2002 and December 2007 with an indication of corresponding events in my life.

Little palm trees represent summer holidays (not necessary in some tropical location :). Winter holidays are not that obvious, but usually there is a drop in January (not in December, since Russian Christmas/NY holidays are 1-10 January and I tend to synchronise those with my family and friends in Russia).

Fire represents period of my weblog server being offline for 2 weeks after the fire that damaged the network at University of Twente (I lived on campus then and my weblog was running on my home machine).

“Relation” and “baby” – since I’ve got other things to do in my free time instead of blogging. My maternity leave in Jan-Apr 2007 is clearly visible.

“Project management” and “Microsoft”: not that important by themselves, but more as an indicator of my stress levels. In that period I was juggling coordination of an EU project, 10 weeks internship in US and personal uncertainties that came from the perspective of not returning to Russia as I had always planned.

Although all those things are important as factors behind the dropping frequency of writing, their influence is indirect. What I think is the real issue behind not blogging is broken information processing routines, especially those related to reading weblogs – those deserve a separate post…

• The kindness of strangers
• Madly letting go
• On being there…