This post is part of the series describing the results of the study of blogger networking practices. Please take into account a couple of things:

• This is a draft. It also comes from the discussion of the study results and surely needs more work.  Healthy scepticism and comments are very welcome.
• Statements are linked to the names of people who talked about particular issue, those might be true or not true for others.

***

Next to non-personal relationships, blogging also enables the building true human connections;

..not pretend or unreal or virtual relationship, the real relationship, where you build up trust and affect and those powerful things that make people work together. Online. (Euan)

What exactly helps to establish and maintain personal relations via blogging? The insights from the research on strong and weak ties (Granovetter, 1973; see also Haythornthwaite, 2005, for a summary of the follow-up research) indicate that the type and frequency of interaction, as well as the number of channels used for it, are important, since stronger ties include frequent and more intimate interaction via a number of channels. While the study results do not provide data on changes in the frequency of interactions between bloggers when their relationships strengthen, they do indicate that those with stronger connections interact on multiple occasions, use different channels and communicate about personal issues as well as professional ones.

An additional view on the factors in the process of growing and maintaining a relationship is provided by Bonnie Nardi (2005), who draws on the research on instant messaging and face-to-face communication (Nardi, Whittaker, & Bradner, 2000; Nardi et al., 2002) to propose that communication includes relational aspects as well as information exchange. The relation between a pair of people creates “a state of communicative readiness in which fruitful communication is likely” (Nardi, 2005, p.91) and includes three dimensions of connection: affinity, commitment and attention. Those dimensions are recognisable in the study presented in this chapter.

According to Nardi affinity is achieved through activities of social bonding – touching, eating and drinking together, sharing experiences in a common space and informal communication – that make people feel connected with each other.

Three of the social bonding activities appear in the data. Although not easily supported by blogging itself, eating and drinking together is clearly important: restaurants are mentioned frequently as a place to meet other bloggers, “Having a coffee” is an important part of microblogging updates and it is food reviews that bloggers mention when talking about Bill Ives, not other items from his weekend blogging list that include, according to the header of his weblog, “art, music, travel, and food”.

Informal communication is supported by the personal nature of blogging: the freedom to choose what to write provides enough opportunities to share jokes, talk about hobbies or “pontificate about life, the universe and such” (Euan). KM bloggers refer to “personal details” on weblogs that help to get to know others, but those serve as conversation starters as well (it is similar in other studies, e.g. bloggers in the study by Lori Kendall (2007) report that posts with something amusing or trivial received more comments than others).

KM bloggers talk about their experiences of connecting to others in terms of sharing spaces: Dave refers to getting to know others in a way similar to how it works in a “common room in a university”, Brett talks about blogging as casual conversations at a water-cooler, Ton talks about “shared spaces” online, neighbourhoods and global villages, Martin appreciates others “coming” to his “place” to leave comments… My own blogging experiences resulted in similar feelings and multiple attempts to explain what might create them (for example, this one).

Commitment is another dimension that Nardi introduces as important. In the case of KM bloggers, expressing commitment to others is manifested through the effort of reading their weblogs (“they took the effort to read what I write”, Luis), repeated interaction and maintaining their own presence via weblogs and other channels.

Finally, capturing and monitoring attention includes, for example, eye contact or negotiating availability of others. In the case of bloggers, linking is often perceived as a sign of attention, and considerable effort goes into monitoring incoming links that help to find new bloggers or keep track of fragments of conversations between weblogs. While weblogs are rarely used explicitly for negotiating availability for an interaction (this is where other channels come into play), they do provide an opportunity to indicate one’s interest in communicating, via comments or linking to a weblog, and leave it open as to if, when and how much one wants to engage in a further exchange.

In creating relationships, publishing and interaction modes of blogging play a role. For non-personal relations to emerge and be sustained, the publishing mode of blogging is enough; in this case, uses of a weblog are informational. For establishing and maintaining personal relations, both publishing and interaction are important. Interaction through weblog conversations helps to develop and renew relations, but it does not happen all the time. Publishing mode (both, reading and writing) provides a backdrop for a relationship: sharing ones’ updates to the network without needing to worry about “spamming” others, developing knowledge of each other, feeling that others are “present” or monitoring when the right moment occurs for an interaction. The power of blogging in respect to networking seems to come from an opportunity to combine two modes with one tool.

***

Granovetter, M. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. Americal Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380.

Haythornthwaite, C. (2005). Social networks and internet connectivity effects. Information, Communication and Society, 8(2), 125-147. doi:10.1080/13691180500146185 (public .pdf)

Kendall, L. (2007). “Shout Into the Wind, and It Shouts Back” Identity and interactional tensions on LiveJournal. First Monday, 12(9).

Nardi, B., Whittaker, S., & Schwarz, H. (2002). NetWORKers and their activity in intensional networks. Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 11(1-2), 205-242. doi:10.1023/A:1015241914483 (public .pdf)

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 (public .pdf)

Nardi, B. A., Whittaker, S., & Bradner, E. (2000). Interaction and outeraction: instant messaging in action. In Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 79-88). doi:10.1145/358916.358975

• Nancy White
• Blog networking study: dealing with a network expansion and filtering information it bring
• Shrunken communication in distributed teams (the egg of communication :)

This post is part of the series describing the results of the study of blogger networking practices. Please take into account a couple of things:

• This is a draft. Healthy scepticism and comments are very welcome.
• Statements are linked to the names of people who talked about particular issue, those might be true or not true for others.

***

By providing an easy way to find and connect to interesting others, weblogs accelerate expansion of one’s network and increase the volume of potentially interesting information flowing through it. Nancy discusses how expansion of networks as a result of blogging creates a need to make choices: “if you choose to follow what blogging network exposes to you may accelerate expansion of the network and then you have to make choice how much to keep up with that”. Not only it is difficult to have a big number of meaningful connections that extension of one’s network brings, but it is also that “relations that these tools enable do not scale” (Euan). Contrary to offline relations that often fade as shared context disappears, weblog-mediated relations “do not go away” as the context and the interactions are “there” (Ton).

One way to deal it the challenges of a growing network is to limit its expansion. When discussing that she does not make as many connections now as when she started blogging Monica suggests that she is “not looking” for more people to connect:

…may be I have enough friends now. Like after getting married, you are not looking anymore. (Monica)

While not necessarily setting limits on a number of new connections, bloggers use the opportunity weblogs provide to get to know others from a distance to informed choices about those they want to engage further. Caution about the degree of engagement with new people is especially visible with Nancy, Euan and Dave, who had extended professional networks prior to starting blogging:

There are in a modest way more people who want to talk to me than I want and can talk to. So I have to manage that. (Euan)

I can’t afford the time to meet everybody I track or listen to. (Dave)

There is no way I can have a relation with everyone who has something important to say about the things I’m trying to learn. (Nancy)

Another way to manage network expansion is choosing not to connect personally with other bloggers. Nancy talks about “information relationships”: not engaging with people at a personal level while still having a meaningful interaction, as well as “trust in what they are producing, which may have nothing to do with trust in them as a human being”. When I try to discuss it in terms of weak and strong ties, she addresses this distinction as insufficient to describe the relations around artefacts that do not necessarily engage the person.

While others do not use the same term they often distinguish between weblogs of people they know and others that they read to monitor particular topics. For example, Dave says that some of weblogs he reads “just to keep an eye on things”, without engaging at more personal level. Shawn mentions not having any connection with some of the authors of the weblogs he subscribes to: “the majority are weak ties or not ties, 5% strong ties”.

Even when not engaging personally with all authors of interesting weblogs, the amount of potentially available information might be overwhelming. Bloggers deal with it by reading weblogs they follow selectively. Some participants describe elaborate strategies for using their networks to scan and filter information for them. For example, Dave has “about fifty science bloggers” in his reader – “they scan journals for me, so I don’t have myself”, “I’ve learnt to trust them over the years”, “it’s much better than summarisation surface”.

Ton is watching “two-three hundreds people” via their online traces and such monitoring what they are doing and writing gives him a “sense of what’s going on in the world” (he stopped reading newspaper and watching TV). He adds that those interactions are different from those with strangers on the street, as he knows the context behind what people write. He is primarily interested not in specific information, but the patterns in it, so he deals with an extendedness of his network by “taking a helicopter view” and then “diving deeper” when he has specific questions.

While not all participants describe such strategies, most of them talk about scanning through their subscriptions, not reading everything (“I read what I can, but I don’t feel bad if I don’t read everything”, Brett) or even not reading at all (“mostly I open new items just to see the bold disappear”, Monica). Some explicitly talk about not being afraid to miss important information and relying on their network to bring it to their attention:

If it’s important it will come back (Gabriela).

People will keep talking about it and it will come to me via different paths (Ton).

Relying on the network to make sense of what is happening in the world bloggers explicitly search for a diversity of topics and points of view in what they read. For example, when I ask about the risks of being in an ‘echochamber’ of likeminded others found through blogging, Euan tells that he likes to “be provoked to think differently” and selects weblogs accordingly. Although he admits that it might be a personal trait, he suggests “you can still choose to be in an echochamber, but it’s easier to choose not to be” as there are so many choices.

Bloggers deal with the expansion of their networks and the information it brings in multiple ways. They choose to limit the expansion by not connecting with new people or engaging in depth. Some of their connections could be described as “information relations”, where weblogs as sources of interesting information rather than as a way to connect personally with their authors. Bloggers manage the information that weblogs bring by reading them selectively (scanning, looking for patterns or not reading at all) at the same time maximising their exposure to a variety of perspectives and trusting that the network brings back what they might miss.

• How new tools change the way I connect with other bloggers
• Blog networking study: participants and their networks
• WBC04: selected

This post is part of the series describing the results of the study of blogger networking practices. Please take into account a couple of things:

• This is a draft. Healthy scepticism and comments are very welcome.
• Statements are linked to the names of people who talked about particular issue, those might be true or not true for others.

***

Next to an opportunity to learn about others from a distance, weblogs support interaction that may grow into a relation between bloggers over time. When Ton describes how interactions that start from comments help a relation to grow and strengthen, he talks about his weblog as a “gravity pull”: “it’s like they are entering your gravity field, falling towards you”.

Luis emphasises the importance of reacting to comments in his weblog as a starting point for an interaction (“last thing you can do is to ignore your comments”) telling that others appreciate the feedback. While Shawn also believes that interaction in the comments is important, he admits that he is not good in it as he uses his weblog mainly to organise his thinking rather than “as a network building or communication device if you like”. He tells that he is “not much of the typer” and leaves comments only if he “can add to a conversation in a constructive way” and then starts wondering what other people “read” into this behaviour. He also gives an example of Johnnie Moore, saying that his blogging style “seem to have the interaction going”.

Nancy echoes this point emphasising that engaging in personal connections (as opposed to “information relations” described in the section 1.5.1) depends a lot on personalities of people, as some as more likely to initiate contact and to “reach out”. Brett provides an example of others “reaching out”:

I’ve had people I’ve left comments on their blog and by doing that they discover mine and they initiated contact with me. [...] they commented on the weblog and followed it more closely [...] I guess [they were] more involved, did more steps for a relation than I did. I just commented once and they came to my site and commented frequently. To some extend it makes you feel an obligation almost to go back to theirs to read it more, to comment more. [...] I feel that I should look at their stuff more closely to see if I want to reciprocate.

Although initial contacts often happen in comments to a weblog post, at the later stage cross-linking between weblogs and trackbacks that notify bloggers about it becomes more important. For Luis linking conversations between blogs helps to “corroborate what someone else said” while also adding own experiences and sharing with others. For Euan permalinks that allow others to link directly to a weblog post “is another big thing” as “each of those little ideas could be linked to and that allows to distribute sense-making networks.” Martin describes conversations that “travelled around weblogs” as “collective intelligence” (“if we talk about questions long enough the idea would emerge somewhere”). In discussing how blogging helps to develop trust Dave talks about it as “fragmented frequent conversation” and draws parallels between blogging and the way human brains work:”We don’t tell stories to each other, we swap anecdotes and blogs are very similar to that”.

When I ask Ton about the differences between comments and conversations across weblogs he refers to the differences in format and length, as well as different types of conversations they enable:

…the comments are usually short-lived, [...] they are immediate responses to the blog post. And a blog conversation spread between weblogs goes on longer. And you can connect it to more things since if you would add links to six different blog posts in your comment it would probably be classified as a spam.

However, he thinks that those different weblog conversations are part of the same process, talking about difficulties of reconstructing paths one follows between comments, people, what they write.

Interaction via weblogs often serves as a starting point for getting in touch via other channels. Shawn suggests that “if someone got the weblog, they are inviting people to contact them” and adds that this is usually the case when he attempts to contact other bloggers by email. He adds that when contacting another blogger, the fact of both blogging creates a commonality, even if content is very different – “I am a blogger, you are a blogger, we should catch up”. Brett calls it “an instant credibility”:

Even if I don’t know someone just the fact that I saw something on their blog, posted a comment, asked a question and they see that I have one. It establishes almost an instant credibility: that this person is worth the time to respond, to read, as to say.

Gabriela explains that having weblogs that provide the context and the history of previous interactions makes contact easier: she feels she can “tap into knowledge of fellow bloggers without [providing] any details”.

Many participants talk about connecting with fellow bloggers via multiple channels. Gabriela gives an example of Jack Vinson, KM blogger she’s never met in person, and says they are mutually connected on different channels. Shawn is not constantly interacting with other bloggers via the blogosphere, saying that if it happens it’s often an email, phone or meeting in person. Luis talks about enhancing his connection with KM bloggers by knowing about their day to day life from Twitter.

For Martin other, more personal channels are needed to get to know others really well “to have a more secure exchange which is not public, to be vulnerable”, which is difficult to do in a weblog “once you become an A-lister”. Ton adds that for those relationships that are established via weblog, most of more personal communication happens via other channels (email, Skype, sharing photos and videos).

Meeting in person is often an important part of the process of building a relation: bloggers tell stories about making an effort to meet other bloggers or synergies of connecting in person after discovering that those they knew via blogging were actually in close physical proximity.

When bloggers meet the history of their interactions comes into play. Luis talks about meeting Bill Ives for the first time, while knowing him via weblog for several years:

It was amazing. [...] It was like two old pals talking about KM and picking it up where we have left it in the blogs.

Euan gives similar example:

First time I met Doc [Searls] there were hugs and smiles and really energetic enthusiastic conversation in a restaurant. And we said at that time that others in the restaurant had known that we’ve never met each other they would think we were mad.

Ton explains that meeting in person brings a relation at a new level. He gives an example of meeting Chris Corrigan and how walking in the forest having “the same conversations” they would have online, created a deeper level of understanding:

Rereading his postings I now hear his voice, but I also know in what kind of context he wrote it, and this additional information helps me interpret what he means on a deeper level.

Martin has similar experiences: “[realising] that they actually have a body helped to appreciate their writing more and use their writing more effectively”.

However, Dave is not sure meeting in person is good or bad after getting to know each other online, as some people “create a different persona in their blog” and meeting in person might results in “identity structure shifts”. When I refer to other bloggers who are eager to meet in person, he tells it depends on a scale: “I can’t afford the time to meet everybody I track or listen to”.

Interacting via multiple channels over time does not only help the connections grow and strengthen, it also contributes to the development of shared understanding and a sense of community. “And then you are talking not about silos [...], but interconnected complex network of blogs”, where bloggers know whom to go to for help or an advice (Luis). Gabriela talks about other bloggers as “permanent support network”, “a sort of fraternity” that she can rely on.

While first interactions between bloggers often happen via weblogs, as relations between bloggers grow they engage with each other via multiple channels. In that respect conversations created by linking between weblogs play a special role: those “fragmented frequent conversations” support both collective development of ideas and strengthening the bonds between bloggers. Over time meeting in person and other channels are added to the mix to continue blogging conversations, to interact in more private and secure settings and to get to know others better. Over time those interactions create a foundation that might enable bloggers to collaborate to get things done together.

• Blog networking study: publishing vs. interaction
• Trust in weblog conversations
• Weblog conversations revisited: an introduction

This post is part of the series describing the results of the study of blogger networking practices. Please take into account a couple of things:

• This is a draft. Healthy scepticism and comments are very welcome.
• Statements are linked to the names of people who talked about particular issue, those might be true or not true for others.

***

The participants of the study are professionals in knowledge management or related fields, although they do not necessary explicitly associate with KM. They live in Europe, US and Australia, know English enough to write on professional topics in it (although only occasionally for Martin and Monica). They are established bloggers (2-7 years), some of whom tried blogging with a variety of tools and have an experience with multiple types of weblogs (e.g. KM and parenting blogs for Brett, internal and external for Luis, personal blog in Romanian vs. professional ones in English for Gabriela).

Participant’s weblogs have different degrees of connection to their work. Dave, Shawn and Nancy integrate blogging in web-sites of their companies, while Monica has an experience of blogging anonymously to hide the connection to her employer. All bloggers write about work-related topics; however the degree of explicit connections (including linking) to their work is different.

It is important to note that for most of the study participants (except of Brett) visibility as a results of blogging contributes to their work as entrepreneurs, consultants or researchers. Also four out of ten participants have a connection with IBM – as a current or past employer for Luis, Dave and Shawn and as a research site for Gabriela (I didn’t realise it when selecting people to be interviewed).

All participants talk about their professional networks expanding as a result of blogging. The degree of this expansion is different and seems to have a relation to the size of blogger’s network prior to blogging, the interest of developing new relations, as well as motivations for and the style of blogging. Blogging might change one’s awareness of own network, for example, by helping to discover people previously invisible (Nancy) or by expanding network without blogger’s awareness of it (Monica).

Using Martin‘s terms, blogging networks of the participants could be characterised as both “diverse and not diverse“. From one side the connections that bloggers establish tend to cross topical, geographical, organisational and hierarchical boundaries. From another – there seem to be a shared culture of embracing diversity (Martin), contributing without direct expectation of a gain (Dave, Nancy) and shared interests and professionalism (Ton, Luis). Several bloggers (Luis, Gabriela) also talk explicitly about a sense of community that emerges in those networks.

Those networks (and practices associated with them) change over time. For example, more people starting blogging change not only the numbers of potentially available others to connect to, but also the intensity of connections with them and topics that connect bloggers (Euan). New tools that appear change the ways bloggers connect via their weblogs (Gabriela). Growing uses of weblogs in a business context might change the perceptions of a weblog by its readers and change the connections as a result (Martin, Monica). While for many bloggers connecting with others is a side-effect of blogging, as they reflect on their experiences they might become more intentional with using weblogs as part of their networking (Brett, Euan, Luis).

• Euan Semple
• Complex domains and researcher accountability
• Blog networking study: an overview

In summer I did interviews with several bloggers writing on “around knowledge management” topics about their practices of networking via weblogs. It took a while to work out summaries for those interviews (mainly due to all kinds of research issues), but now I’m happy to share them online. A bit of the “methodological” details are at the end of this post; the results of the study are coming up as a series of blog posts.

Interview summaries:

• Brett Miller (Theoria cum Praxi)
• Dave Snowden (Dave’s blog)
• Euan Semple (The Obvious?) – Euan asked to put audio of the interview online, it’s coming and I’ll link it here
• Gabriela Avram (Coniecto)
• Luis Suarez (Elsua)
• Martin Roell (Gute vragen)
• Monica Andre (B2OB)
• Nancy White (Full Circle Associates)
• Shawn Callahan (Anecdote)
• Ton Zijlstra (Ton’s Interdependent Thoughts)

When selecting bloggers for interviews I aimed to represent a variety of blogging and networking experiences. Bloggers were selected by what I call a “diversity snowball” approach. Since I wasn’t following KM blogophere as actively as before I first talked discussed a list of KM bloggers that might be interesting to interview with Jack Vinson and then proceeded by asking the interviewees to suggest other bloggers they thought were different from themselves. I contacted more people for the interviews, but had to stop somewhere due to the logistics around summer holidays and looming PhD deadlines. I’d love to be able to hear from more bloggers about their own practices – hopefully sharing the results of this study online helps to have a public conversation on those.

When asking bloggers to participate I indicated my intentions of publishing summaries of the interviews and draft results online, as well as using their real names and links to their weblogs in the reports. Semi-structured interviews covered the following themes:

• professional background of a participant and characteristics of her network in KM field prior to blogging
• changes in the network or networking practices because of blogging
• uses of weblogs for developing, maintaining and activating relations as a starting point for articulating stages of the process at more granular level
• place of the weblog in the ecosystem of networking tools (mainly focusing on what weblogs are good for and when they do not work).
• important networking-related issues that haven’t been discussed

I did all interviews via Skype, recorded them and made notes. I then used anonymised summaries of the interviews to discuss emergent themes with two other researchers (colleagues who are aware of my work, but not blogging themselves or doing research on blogging). That discussion served as an input to start working on the study results and on revising summaries to make sure they included important information. Revised summaries were sent to the participants, edited to address their comments and then published online.

An overview of the study as a whole and links to the results are here.

• Monica Andre
• Hard choices: researcher vs. blogger?
• Blog networking study: staying in touch

This interview is part of the study of blogger networking practices: links to other interviews and some background, links to the results.

***

Brett lives in the USA and works as a system engineer. He talks about working in an “old school high-tech industry”, where not many people know “what the weblog actually is, what people use blogs for”.

He started blogging on KM topics in 2002 when working in KM and studying it for his Masters. Later he started two other weblogs, on autism and trampoline and tumbling, to share information on those topics with other parents. [After the interview Brett joined his KM and autism blogs into one - Theoria cum Praxi.]

Brett says that blogging extended his views on KM: “the biggest thing was the realisation that there are different solutions for different aspects of KM problems”. “When I first started I was a beginner and reading different blogs gave me different approaches.”

Prior to blogging he knew several KM people, but mainly locally. As a result of blogging, he says, “I know more people in different areas of KM when I knew before.” Blogging helped him to reach people he wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise (he gives an example of Dave Snowden, with whom he engaged in multiple exchanges via weblogs).

He compares blogging to conversations at a water cooler, saying that it’s a way to “meet people to see if it’s someone you want to get to know better”. “[Blogging] does help to get to know them a little bit, their background, and some people obviously write more personally than others do.” He tells that relations established are similar to those with the acquaintances; it is “mostly a professional relationship that doesn’t go beyond exchanging of ideas on knowledge management.”

For Brett contacting other bloggers is easy “even we don’t really know each other: “Even if I don’t know someone just the fact that I saw something on their blog, posted a comment, asked a question and they see that I have one. It establishes almost an instant credibility: that this person is worth the time to respond, to read, as to say.”

“If I see something that’s interesting I don’t hesitate to comment. [...] It’s an interesting way to have conversations that you don’t otherwise have. But I don’t consider that a sort of connection if I leave a comment on someone’s blog once and never have another conversation with that person.”

“I’ve had people I’ve left comments on their blog and by doing that they discover mine and they initiated contact with me. [...] they commented on the weblog and followed it more closely [...] I guess [they were] more involved, did more steps for a relation than I did. I just commented once and they came to my site and commented frequently. To some extend it makes you feel an obligation almost to go back to theirs to read it more, to comment more. It’s an interesting dynamics, I haven’t thought about it. I feel that I should look at their stuff more closely to see if I want to reciprocate.”

He does not read everything in weblogs he subscribes to: “A couple of years ago someone wrote ‘don’t be mad at me if I don’t read everything that you write in your weblog’. I read what I can, but I don’t feel bad if I don’t read everything.” However, he often comes back to his own posts “to see what I wrote 5 years ago”.

He reads weblogs “to keep up with what people are saying”, but does not maintain contacts through the weblog. “If I contact people it’s through email, Facebook or instant messaging. [...] If they say something on their weblog and I think it’s interesting I’ll respond there not in a separate email, but if it’s something new and especially if it’s one-to-one thing I’ll email”.

Brett estimates connecting with 100-150 people as a result blogging, noting that they are those with whom he had “a relatively extended interaction, not exchanging just a couple of comments”. “I think that I probably contacted with more people through the autism blog (than KM people) mainly because it’s a smaller area or when I started it were not many people blogging on that. [...] [I am] more passionate about those other topics, KM for me is a kind of personal development thing it’s only mainly affects me. The other things that I write really affect more people than just me, I write it as much for other people as for myself.”

For Brett meeting people through blogging is “more of a side effect”: “I started to get information out there that I though was useful to me and someone else may be interested, so it’s kind of side effect that I met people I wouldn’t meet otherwise.”

“I don’t really use blogs as a networking tool, but it has been useful to me that way. I didn’t set out to do that, but those things happen with this medium”. We also discuss his experience with starting a weblog on trampoline and tumbling to share information and to connect with other parents. He realises that it might be his experience with KM blogging: “I’m not in KM anymore, I use those things in practice [...] but I have taken those lessons [from KM weblog] and applied to those other two blogs”.

• Weblog as a backstage: performance is counterproductive
• Nancy White
• Blog networking study: finding and being found