[This blog is also a diary]

Somewhere in the middle of the night Alexander woke up for a bit of my attention. Once sleep was broken all kinds of things followed:

• I kept on returning to conversations at work about empowerment and leadership and drove myself more awake.
• Got out of the bed thinking that writing things down would help.
• Checked email (deciding not to send replies timed in the middle of the night) and posted on Twitter about being awake and thinking.
• Started to work on a blogpost to park ideas (in order to get back to sleep) with Twitter notifications popping-up.
• Didn’t get into a blogpost writing flow, but instead socialised on Twitter:
  • followed a few links, some social, some with work-related input
  • waited for cranberry-pear-ginger chutney recipe
  • talked about blogging for parking ideas and browsed through my blog to get relevant links
• Got a snack
• Made a little present “from Sinterklaas” and put it into Alexander’s shoe to keep alive the believe that this guy is real and actually comes to pick up drawings that kids make for him.
• Realised that the blogpost I wanted to write wouldn’t be finished today, saved in drafts (hopefully for tomorrow).
• Wrote this post and now hoping to fall asleep while there is still decent time left before the alarm clock goes on.

• 6 years of blogging
• What I’m doing these days
• #ht09: some thoughts on hypertext

Just to unload somewhere the ideas coming from conversations at Hypertext 2009 and reading an advance copy of Reading Hypertext (thanks, Mark!) on the way back.

[I'm not an expert in hypertext as a field of study and these are my "thinking aloud" notes when trying to understand it].

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I think it makes sense to distinguish between

• hypertext as a presentation format – e.g. what we encounter on the web
• hypertext works – e.g. hypertext fiction, written to use the format to impact readers in specific – not always predictable – ways by (probably intentionally) connecting presentation-plot-story into a whole
• conceptual hypertext – the conceptual principles of how it works/could work and why that is interesting and valuable

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There was some discussion on difficulties of reading hypertext and the rightful comment by Mark that it shouldn’t be something special since people somehow manage to deal with reading the web. I don’t think that the hypertext as a presentation format is a problem, but from what I’ve seen/read so far it seems that reading hypertext works might be. The challenge is very much about cognitive model (re: Reading Hypertext, chapter 5 by Lowe, I’m only half way through it!) that requires more conscious reading (probably coming from the need to keep all three panels Lowe describes active at the same time to be able to get the story).

I can imagine that in some cases there is also conceptual overhead and usability overhead: the need to understand the principles behind hypertext (=some of what I call conceptual hypertext) and the learning needed to adjust reading behaviour to the particular hypertext system. I’d suggest that it’s those things that could make reading hypertext works difficult for those who don’t have a problem of dealing with hypertext presentations.

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We had a few interesting conversations about weblogs and hypertext. I don’t have any problems agreeing that a weblog is hypertext when we talk about hypertext-as-presentation-format, but woludn’t equate blogging to writing hypertext works. There is more to think and to write about in this respect, but what I think matters most is the (lack of) intentionality in blogging, focus on an individual rather than a story and the time, telling bits and pieces about various stories as they unfold, so there is no way of knowing that the something that appears in the text today will actually fire later the way Chekhov’s gun does.

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Wondering if those who build hypertext tools are busy more with conceptually perfect tools rather than those that serve a purpose/easy to use/fit with the rest of things people do online.

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Since I was asked a couple of times about it I’ll probably come up with what tools I might need as a blogger, but I can already say that I don’t need tools. I need plug-ins and mashups that use conceptual hypertext ideas to turn what I already have on my weblogs into something that works better for me and/or those who come across it.

• 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?
• Hypertext writing
• Matching activities supported by a weblog to different stages of idea development

Efimova, L. (2009). Weblog as a personal thinking space. In: HT’09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, June 2009. New York: ACM. DOI=10.1145/1557914.1557963 (.pdf)

See on Slideshare: Weblog as a personal thinking space

• Paper: Weblog as a personal thinking space
• Blogging PhD ideas chapter: missing piece of the discussion section
• Blogging for myself or for others?

The deadline for submitting this paper was just a couple of weeks before the due date for my dissertation, so I hesitated a lot deciding to work on it. I’m glad I did: it provided a great opportunity to transform the insights from the study of my own practices of using weblog as an instrument to develop PhD ideas (Chapter 3 of the dissertation) into something that can live its own life.

Efimova, L. (2009). Weblog as a personal thinking space. HT’09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, June 2009. New York: ACM. DOI=10.1145/1557914.1557963 (.pdf)

Abstract. While weblogs have been conceptualised as personal thinking spaces since their early days, those uses have not been studied in detail. The purpose of this paper is to explore how a weblog can contribute to the process of developing ideas in a long-term complex project. To do so I use autoethnography to reconstruct my personal blogging practices in relation to developing PhD ideas from two perspectives. I first discuss my practices of using a weblog as a personal information management tool and then analyse its uses at different stages in the process of working on a PhD dissertation: dealing with fuzzy insights, sense-making and turning ideas into a dissertation text. The findings illustrate that next to supporting thinking in a way private notebooks do, a weblog might serve similar roles as papers on one’s office desk: dealing with emerging insights and difficult to categorise ideas, while at the same time creating opportunities for accidental feedback and impressing those who drop by.

© ACM, 2009. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in HT’09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, June 2009. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1557914.1557963 [This is the first time I actually tried to negotiate something different from the default copyright agreement; it didn't work.]

See also: short, practitioner oriented version of the insights from this paper – Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas

• Why PhDs should start blogging
• DIRN workshop
• RSS feeds: PhD progress and weblog research

While I didn’t blogged, I read weblogs. Big share of those are on parenting-related themes. One of the trends that I was surprised to see is how many of those are into “pro-blogging” – blogging not only for the fun of it, but also for some business-related purposes (some links are here).

This seems to the case for “weblogs in general” too – I come across more and more advice on pro-blogging. Reading it I realise how much what I do with my weblog is guided by other choices and principles: I prefer not to define goals and strategies for blogging and while I’m glad to have readers, I do not spend much time putting on paper who is my audience and how exactly my weblog will make it happy.

And, on the top of it, I get annoyed when blogging is conceptualised primarily as a medium for public communication (especially with microphones or megaphones as a visual metaphor ;). So, working on a PhD chapter that describes my own blogging practices, I wanted to show the other side of it – blogging for myself. Below is a slightly edited piece from the current draft.

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Blogging is frequently viewed as a medium for public communication: it is reasonable to assume that those who do not want their words to be read by a broad audience would use another medium. However, while the need to communicate is a part of blogging, it is not necessary the primarily reason for it.

In my case blogging grew out of a need for a place to organise my thinking and exploration; the readers, as well as writing for them, appeared later. While the public nature of blogging was the factor I took into account from the beginning of it, the primary force that shaped it was its usefulness for myself.

In the process of balancing my own needs and interests with those of my potential readers when blogging I often make choices to serve my own interests first. Those choices shaped my blogging practices in multiple ways.

Work-in-progress instead of polished pieces. Although a weblog readers are more likely to benefit from well-thought and carefully crafted posts, my need for capturing ideas at their early stages resulted in writing quick work-in-progress memos. Using weblog for a quick documentation, often squeezed between working on other task also resulted in writing many relatively short posts, connected by links. While it provides a trail of connected ideas that works for my own purposes, it is more difficult to follow and to make sense of for a reader, who could probably benefit more from reading a longer entry that would connect several linked posts into a coherent whole.

Fragmented weblog focus. When started, my weblog was focused primarily on the topics related to learning and knowledge management. Over time my writing shifted to other topics, potentially alienating loyal readers. While I was “not sure that reading all methodology ‘thinking aloud’ is that fun” (quoted from this post) it was essential for my learning process, so it became relatively big part of the weblog content. Currently, the content of my weblog is pretty fragmented as it reflects the change of my interests and topics I worked on over time.

“Selfish” tagging. Another dimension where the choices between my own interests and those of an external audience appeared was using tags for organising my own posts. While I had multiple opportunities to use tags that would help users of external systems to find relevant entries in my weblog, I haven’t used them since this would mean losing personally meaningful tag-based navigation in my weblog. The choice of terms to use as tags is also influenced primarily by their relevance for my own thinking practice.

The reasons for choosing to serve my own needs before those of my audience are twofold:

• Serving the needs of others might make blogging meaningless for myself. For example, writing only on a narrow set of topics in the weblog defeats the initial purpose of blogging to collect in one place fragmented bits relevant to my thinking.
• In my case too much dependence on the audience is proved to be paralysing: I would spend too much time trying to figure out for whom exactly to write and what their needs might be (a bit more on writing for non-existing audience). Also, non-intrusive nature of blogging (e.g. compared to the email that is delivered to the mailboxes) means that there is no necessarily an audience for a specific post, so writing to serve others in this case feels similar to giving a presentation in an empty room.

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Other bloggers on related issues:

• Don’t Tell Me How To Blog
• Your Blog Archives: To Cull or Not to Cull?
• The luxury of pupose-less blogging can be a good thing

• Weblogs: conversations with self and conversations with others
• Public, private and controlled spaces
• Things I did in the middle of the night

Just realised that it’s been 6 years of blogging. Last Saturday. I didn’t even think of it.

I guess it’s called growing up – similar to the moment when your birthdays are not that important any more and you have to do a little calculation to figure out what to say when someone asks about your age :)

• #ht09: some thoughts on hypertext
• Paper: Weblog as a personal thinking space
• Things I did in the middle of the night