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.

• Luis Suarez
• Blog networking study: establishing and maintaining relations via blogging
• Trust in weblog conversations

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

***

Monica is Portuguese. Till recently she worked in a research lab in Lisbon focusing on information behaviour and information management, but took a leave to work on her PhD research, which has not been supported by her group.

Monica says that she started blogging by reading other weblogs, commenting and sending links. Her own blogging came when she felt comfortable sharing and making mistakes in public. She created a weblog in July 2002 to complement work on her Masters, writing primarily for her advisor. Although she found out that her advisor wasn’t reading the weblog, others found her. The connections she developed via her weblog make her feel having many advisors and being connected to people who are “more friends and colleagues than those I work with”.

Since then she had multiple blogs. She says that all of them serve different information needs “it didn’t make sense to have a blog with all of that, but instead different rooms with different needs”.

Her second blog was part of her work – she used it to collect ideas on how blogs could be used in organisations, however it was anonymous as mentioning weblogs before got negative responses from her organization. Her authorship of the weblog was discovered via a newspaper. She was an only researcher at a blogging conference and a journalist “connected the dots” referring to her as a Portuguese expert on organisational blogging. Because of that publication she was discovered by people from other departments, who looked for someone to help them to start blogging. She was happy to be able to put her name on the weblog: she talks about her own practice of checking weblogs of others to find out who they are and dissatisfaction of not being visible in the same way. However, writing openly was not very well received by her boss because of political reasons. That was difficult to accept since information in her weblog was actually used by the team and she didn’t put anything personal in it (“[In my weblog] I will not talk about myself. For me blogging and being in public are the same”).

Monica also tells about the experience of leaving her research group and some unfinished projects to work on the PhD. Her colleagues commented that she wouldn’t really leave them – since her weblog and her ideas were on the weblog. “I had mixed feelings, so I stopped posting work-related things there. [...] I felt used, [I felt they were saying] we are not supporting your PhD, but we still have your enthusiasm, your motivation, your resources”.

Changes in professional network as a result of blogging

Monica said that her blogging friends were already established when she started writing her own weblog and it did not change much. She talked about getting to know people via weblogs and then discovering “real life” details about them (“later I discovered he was a professor in Spain”).

She told about difficulties of being recognised as an expert working in a hierarchical environment, when individual contributions to reports are often muted (” I could be the one who made the reports, the name of the head of the department and then the team…”). She told that blogging helps others to know you, and to be recognised as an expert, and in tern help your own “professional self-esteem”. She also noted this visibility challenges existing power distribution in organisations and “that’s why blogs are also a problem”.

“I didn’t realise that linking and giving credits to someone’s work would extend my professional network extended very quickly.” She then told a story of being contacted by a municipality government from Spain who wanted her to speak at an event. “I didn’t know I was followed by them. If [people] leave comments, you have a clue, a footprint. It turns out that guy who was reading my blog suggested the government that I would be a good person to talk as a keynote speaker”. When she received an email she thought it was a joke, but they called to confirm.

“Before [blogging] my network was known by me, now [it is] beyond my knowledge and my control… I existed and had a life apart from my existence, just because of the insights I put in the blogs I created… I also discovered things about myself I didn’t know… when more people started saying something about me”.

She also noted that she wasn’t sure anymore what her professional network was, since she considers many bloggers she knows friends, not professional contacts as she can observe the details of their lives that “only friends have a privilege [to see]”

She says that “blogs per se don’t create the network, they do not create relationships”, that it’s what people are doing with their weblogs, their motivations to write, style, engagement with others, events that they go to.

“At the first years of blogging I made more connections than today. More than that most of the connections I made died with the time. Now I’m following less people, may be 15 that I read regularly, the rest I just scan… mostly I open new items just to see the bold disappear” She thinks that this is because of the change in a writing style, which now more frequently includes business motivation, hidden agendas, competitiveness…”. However, she also adds “may be I have enough friends now. Like after getting married, you are not looking anymore.”

On languages

Monica talked about the challenges of choosing the language to blog. She writes primarily in Portugeese and says that this choice makes her “invisible”. Although she thinks that her English is “not good enough to have a public conversation”, she writes in it when criticising someone’s work written in English as “it is not fair to critic while not allowing the person to know what I’m saying”. She was surprised to realise that tags in her weblog were in English.

• Turning work into life
• Euan Semple
• Blog networking study: publishing vs. interaction

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

***

Ton is an independent consultant on KM, learning and social media (at the moment of the interview he works in this role for a bit more than half a year, worked in small KM consulting company before). I interviewed him during his holiday in Canada where he visited several bloggers he knew online.

He started writing his weblog in 2002, after being active at the KnowledgeBoard, online KM community, writing on KM, philosophy, technology development, “on the edge of what I’m doing, reflective writing”. At that moment he was active in KM for about 2 years, still “a newbie in the field”.

He says his professional network exploded as a result of blogging, with 85-90% of his contacts now somehow connected via weblogs. “I have found connections to people that have a shared interest, a shared level of professionalism [...] regardless of where they are. ” He talks about lack of connections with like minded people he had at that moment – “In my company I felt as a village idiot at times, as I was the only one at that time with these ideas”. For him “building online network was a real treasure trove”.

He talks about the energy of finding others with similar interests, providing an example of BlogTalk conference in 2003, the first time for many bloggers to meet each other in person – “‘coming home’ may be a strong term, but at least a warm bath’ of social interaction”.

On the connections between online and face-to-face

Ton views his weblog as a “conversation starter”, as a “big neon sign” that invites others. He describes how relations strengthen over time in blog comment conversation – “it’s like they are entering your gravity field, falling towards you”. At the certain moment there might be a feeling that just talking together is not enough and there is a shared need to do something together. For Ton, meeting people in person before being able to work with them is essential; he has to “look in their eye”, to see “the whole person” next to knowing about their shared interests from blogging.

Those meetings in person bring 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, creates 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 you interpret for he means on a deeper level”.

However, he says that the connection between blogging and meeting in person goes both ways – while he makes an effort to meet his blog contacts in person, he also searchers for online traces of people he meets face-to-face first “to get a complete picture”. He adds that this is how he “makes sense of the world around”, that there is no real distinction between online and offline – “the biggest change that happen to me is that whole this online thing is my life”.

On the role of weblogs in the ecosystem of different tools

Ton thinks his weblog plays two important roles. For people, he is already connected to, it’s a place to think aloud and to reflect, to get to deeper exchanges: “when I write my network is imagined audience”. At the same time weblog is a “gravity pull”, “a starting point for new relations”, that may or may not grow as a result of people stumbling upon his posts. He adds that for those relationships that are established via weblog, most of more personal communication happens via other channels (email, Skype, sharing photos, videos).

I ask about the role of different tools when working together with his blog contacts, Ton says that the lines are difficult to draw, but he could often trace that it “started somewhere in a weblog” and then “spilled over to other channels”. He explains that does not chronicle what he does in his weblog since it would involve his colleagues and clients. He adds that he started to feel more free do to so after starting to work for himself (“they are completely my projects, so it says more about me now”) and, although content-wise his work didn’t change much, now he also needs “to be a bit more visible as an individual consultant”.

Ton talks about the “shared space” where interactions with others happen. He says it could be anywhere [online], giving an example of a German blogger whom he first “met” in a comments section of an American weblog. For Ton, keeping up with others’ “online traces” (not only blogs, but also other channels) helps to maintain a relationship via trivial exchanges (e.g. updates on Jaiku, Twitter – “I’m having a coffee”), similar to the type of exchanges with people in a close geographic proximity.

When I ask about 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 f the same process, talking about difficulties of reconstructing paths one follows between comments, people, what they write.

Ton says that his weblog was a starting point for different professional networks (adding that this kept him blogging), but it is also his reputation now, since people can explore the archives to find out more about him. He gives an example of a client worried about Ton having too technology-driven view on the problem who then became reassured it wasn’t so after he read Ton’s weblog. He adds “this is a trustworthy anchor point, because you can’t fake six years worth of blogging”. While he uses a spectrum of other channels to communicate, weblog is still “the core” representing him.

On connections between information and relations to people

Ton says that he uses his social environment as information filter. He 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. Relational context sheds new light on the information being shared, which in turn changes the relations.

Ton suggests that online relationships “do not go away”, the context and the interactions are still “there”, so eventually those become difficult to keep up. He says that he is not afraid to miss reading weblogs – “if they are talking about the important stuff, it still will be there when I return to it, people will keep talking about it and it will come to me via different paths”. He deals with an extendedness of his network by “taking a helicopter view” and then “diving deeper” when he has specific questions.

He adds that “really deep relations do not scale well”, but that the actual number of interactions with those who are very close might be small. “In the beginning you also have to show each other that you are making and effort, to may be seduce each other a bit. Network starts by giving [...] and part of it is an attention and empathy; you have to make the effort first.” He tells that after a while it’s different, still an effort, but very different type of interactions. “Even if there is no interaction I still see the connection”. He talks about seeing others coming online with their status updates. “There is no real interaction, but I know that he sees me coming online as well”.

• Blog networking study: establishing and maintaining relations via blogging
• Blog networking study: interviews
• Blog networking study: participants and their networks

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

***

Shawn is the founder of Anecdote, a consulting company of three that focuses on change management, learning and storytelling. He lives in Australia and used to work in IBM prior to his current work. When he started blogging, his professional network was primarily in KM and primarily Australian (with many people local to his city).

He first started blogging on KM topic about in 2002, while working at IBM. However, it did not work that time. Later he created another blog and wrote for about a year, gaining experiences of regular blogging and learning about the medium. When Anecdote was founded in 2004, a weblog became a centre of the company’s web-site; Today Shawn blogs there together with two other colleagues. Their blog is often in the top 100 most visited weblogs in Australia.

Changes in a network after starting blogging

Shawn gives an example of getting into an interaction with David, who is consulting on how to run consulting companies and “one of the big players in this field”. When David started blogging, Shawn commented on his blog and they’ve “got a bit of interaction going”. In a half a year Shawn and his colleagues decide to contact David for advice. In the conversation that follows Shawn finds out that “his daily rate was far greater than [they] could afford”. When he admits that David says “we are friends now, so I’m happy to do it for nothing”.

“And it was at that point I realised that this whole blogging thing is extremely powerful way of building relationships. People you’ve never met face-to-face and they are willing to do important things for you.”

On difference in types of relations developed as a result of blogging

Shawn says that the main difference with the relationships developed after starting blogging is geographic spread. He also talks about an asymmetry in those relations: “There is also this weaving thing that I’m sure you’ve experienced too when going to a conference when people come up to you and they know you through your blog, but you have never met them before. It’s a kind of a disarming experience… You feel it’s quite an asymmetrical relationship; they have a really good sense of who you are, what you do, what interests you, and you don’t even know their name. I think that’s kind of peculiar to people who blog and have some sort of readership I suppose.”

What do you think creates this friendship and knowing, how does it happen?

He says that interaction in the comments is important, but admits that he is not good in that.
“But I’m not good in comments on blogs, I use my weblog primarily to get my thoughts out and to get ideas clear in my own head and for a sort of a source material for future things I might want to do. I use it more for that than as a network building or communication device if you like.” At a later moment 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”, also wondering what people “read” into his behaviour as he is not very active in that.

He also says that it’s difficult to delineate what weblogs do in that respect, since there are often multiple tools involved. He gives an example of getting to know Nancy White through her blog and other online activities and inviting her to stay in their house when he found out she was coming to Australia, and their collaboration that followed.

He suggests that weblogs provide “some level of reputation”, exposing people and their interests. It is “not explicit, you intuitively get a feel for type of the person they are and whether that [...] is your type of person. It’s almost like a pre-dating.”

“Photos seem to give your more than just the text. You also get a sense of the people in terms of links and depth of their post”. He tells that he mainly reads weblogs through RSS feeds, so “it’s not that much the design and appearance of it”.

We talk about weblogs he reads and what kind of relations are those

He subscribes to about 300 weblogs. “I tend to gravitate to weblogs to the people I know (I met personally and know quite well) and bloggers who write in different field [...] most KM blogs not very interesting at all… The majority are weak ties or not ties, 5% strong ties…”

“For the people I know I read to find out how they are going, people I don’t know I read for their content.” For people he knows weblogs provide an “additional way to see how they are going”, to find out “if there is something important to ring them up”. He says that it often prompts “some other way of communicating with the person”.

He says that “weblog is pretty accurate but incomplete reflection of the person”, giving an example of a wrong assumptions about events in another blogger’s life given her content.

Role weblogs play in the different stages of developing relation with others

“If someone got the weblog, they are inviting people to contact them”. He says that this is usually the case when he attempts to contact them 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”.

Shawn talks about finding other weblogs “through serendipitous encounters”, following links and recommendations of others. However, he says that with many of those weblogs he tends “not to engage except of reading” and just skims through.

In tells that his weblog is mainly a business blog, so the relations that come out of it are mainly business-related. He gives an example of people contacting him because of weblog and asking for a meeting. “It might turn into business or may not, it’s a beginning point”.

We also discuss the differences between bloggers in respect to the networking and interaction. Shawn gives an example of Johnnie Moore, whos blogging style “seem to have the interaction going”, but tells that he is not constantly interacting with other bloggers via the blogosphere (if it happens it’s often an email, phone or f2f meeting).

We also talk about the ratios between personal and business content in weblogs, and Shawn notes that “the best mix is somewhere in between”. He talks then about the blurring lines between business and personal in knowledge-related fields and notes that “people hire you based on trust, which doesn’t come from how clever you are, but what type of person they think you are”.

• Blog networking study: establishing and maintaining relations via blogging
• You can’t participate in life via conference call: media vs. pace
• Blog networking study: getting things done

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

***

Nancy is an independent consultant who does work on communities, learning and online facilitation, primarily in non-profit sector. She lives in the USA, but travels frequently around the world for work and does most of her work online.

She first tried blogging in 1999 with a personal weblog and another one to share resources with a client, but it didn’t work for her then. She got back into blogging in 2004 when many of her clients were asking about weblogs, so she had to get hands-on experiences with it. At this moment her weblog is a central part of her company website.

Although her network was already globally distributed and online and her web-site was pretty well-known when she started blogging, Nancy talks about being “shocked at the response” she’s got from the people she didn’t really knew who welcomed her weblog. For Nancy the weblog was a “new form of web presence”. “It revealed new network that I didn’t reciprocated with. [...] Weblog revealed the people who were following my work [without me knowing about it or engaging with them]“. “It was shocking to see that my network was bigger than I thought”. She wasn’t that aware how much the resources from her web-site were used, blogging and attention to incoming links that is part of it led her to finding those people.

She adds that blogging also made her more connected with “people in the KM world”, adding that she is not seeing herself as being in knowledge management and has discomfort with the term. It wasn’t only those in KM, but also “process people” (facilitators, Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry), or edubloggers that she’s got connected to after publishing a paper on blog communities. Other people would position her weblog as a “KM blog” or “educational blog”, while she doesn’t necessarily sees it that way herself. She adds that the variety of people she connected to via blogging is very visible on her Twitter now and that blogging made her appreciate and understand the idea of networks next to groups and communities.

I ask what in blogging results in those boundary-crossing connections. Nancy suggests that it is the public nature of blogs and a lot of cross-linking, so they are easy to discover. However, comparing to communities, where there is usually an “agreement what it’s all about even if it’s about nothing”, with a weblog it is more easy “to cross over” between topics (with both, writing and reading).

Later we also discuss that this is a conscious choice: “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”.

How weblogs work to support relations

There is a technical side of it and the process side. Technically, it’s cross-linking between weblogs that leads to recommendation, the search that supports discoverability and the ease of publishing.

It’s also the “process and values that many people bring into blogging”, which is “about contributing” that “you get a lot out of”. First it’s publishing one’s ideas to the world, but then cross-linking and commenting that helps to discover others, then “start discerning who you want to read” and eventually a possibility to “start working with those people”.

She adds that selecting what to read also works at the level of a topic, as it’s easy to track a topic via several weblogs or a search feed to learn and to decide if it makes sense to go further. At that level it’s “transaction around information”, and a different type of reputation.

Nancy talks about an “information relationship”, not engaging with people at a personal level, while still having a meaningful interaction, and a “trust in what they are producing, which may have nothing to do with trust in them as a human being”. She adds that weak ties and strong ties are insufficient to describe a relation, that there is a type of relations around artefacts that are not necessarily engage the person. “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”.

However, those “information relationships” might turn into “human relationship”, but it then it depends a lot on personalities of people, as some as more likely to initiate contact and to “reach out”. Weblogs provide a way to get to know people, to learn about them to be able to decide on engaging further or not and do so without a “commitment of giving time and attention to a relation”. Blogging helps to get to know others by providing “a window into their life over time”, “exposure of their thinking over time”, however it depends a lot on how well people write (“you don’t get to know crappy writers via their weblogs”).

Blogging and other tools

Comparing to other tools, public nature of blogging important aspect, “if they wouldn’t be public, lots of things wouldn’t happen”.

Comparing to other tools (e.g. Twitter) where adding people is explicit and often deliberate, “blogs are more about connecting through content”.

Nancy says she doesn’t really keep track of how her weblog could contribute to business, but she assumes that it is a kind of “screening device” where potential clients can check her background. She also says that the communication about business is usually in private (e.g. email or phone).

On exposure and the consequences of it

Nancy tells how now blogging exposes her to “cold calls”, people who want something from her (for free). She tries to help, since “you never know how it comes back to it”, but says that “exposure has a cost”.

We also discuss the difficulties around weblog-mediated relations. “The public nature of blogging puts relation building in a public view”, so it is more difficult to “get out [of them] gracefully” if you need to. While it’s difficult to delineate exactly how weblogs differ from in-person relations, in the discussion we talk about the public nature of it, lack of social cues (“you don’t know people well enough to know what you are getting into”) and the ease of publishing (“I can screw up really easy [...] and with more people, so I can look like a fool a lot faster”). She adds that there is a need to adjust the ways to set boundaries and to respect them.

• Blog networking study: an overview
• Something unspeakably alien
• Author-centred vs. topic-centred blogging

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

***

Martin is German, born and raised in Luxembourg. For the last 6 years he worked as a freelance consultant (internet, e-commerce, knowledge management, web 2.0), but he is leaving it now to focus on personal coaching.

He started blogging in 2002; then he did not know anyone in KM world. He told about discovering others by following blogrolls and being discovered by others (“I write my thing and somebody appears”). He also described how weblogs “kept the connections together”, conversations that “travelled around weblogs” and collective intelligence (“if we talk about questions long enough the idea would emerge somewhere”). “It was not static, not a library – I could take part in the development of these fields”.

However, Martin says that those things are part of the past: he is not blogging for the last 1,5 years. He refers to changes in his work and dynamics around his weblog as reasons for it. In the German-speaking internet his weblog became “quite famous” and got exposed to a “different sphere of people”, who expected him to “be a pundit who knows everything”. From one side he wanted to play that role as it allowed him to get more business. From another side catering for these expectations in his weblog collided with the open and vulnerable style of blogging necessary for learning and networking with peers. At the certain moment there was too much confusion, so he decided to stop blogging. [At the moment of interview Martin started blogging again, now at Gute vragen.]

On languages

Martin wrote mainly in German with some posts in English, so I asked him about it. He talked about the difficulties of making a choice of the language to write: “If I blog in German, most of the world will not read it. If I write things in English, most of my German network will not interact around it online”. He also talked about differences in English(-speaking) and German blogosphere: German as self-contained, shared culture references, English-speaking as being more open for other cultures, other ways of expression, being more careful about understanding each other.

On the role of weblogs in the ecosystem of other tools

Weblogs are good for discovering who is there and to “get to know them from the distance and decide if you want to know more”.

He noticed that after he stopped blogging, reading other weblogs become even more important, “to see what [his contacts] are up to without having to interrupt them, to contact them directly”.

Weblogs are “alive, living, published now; it’s a conversation going on instead of publishing exchange” that gives the feeling that “people are there”. At the same time they are also persistent (“I can see how you change”). It is also personal space of the weblog: “a weblog is about me even if you think you write about a topic”. A blogger can write on any topic, “I can change my job or interests, but the URL will be the same”. With a weblog “you connect to the person, not the topic”.

He suggested that blogging might be good to learn and to explore, but that “a different mode is needed” to get things done. He notices that he tends to confuse work with online interactions: “I have to pull myself out of conversations and learning to do my work [...] to get things done offline… to write that article…”

He talked about the work that he acquired as a result of blogging, but stressed that “it’s a side effect of learning and an exploration”. According to Martin, blogging for marketing purposes “has a different attitude and you get clash of the contexts”. Now he would rather express what he thinks and “people will appear who appreciate that”.

When I asked about the role of blogging in making possible to do something together, he described how relations grow from shallow to more deep, starting from a shared interest and then eventually building an image of someone as trustworthy. He said that he had a couple of only online relations that turned into working together: “the way we worked together fits the image I’ve got from blog interaction, there were no big surprises”.

However, he added that meeting people in person was helpful to develop the relationship. “[Realising] that they actually have a body helped to appreciate their writing more and use their writing more effectively”

How blogging helps to develop trust?

“Willingness to expose what you don’t know. Weblog entries that showed insight and ended with questions. Willingness to learn… not yet finished thinking”. Or the opposite, taking a radical position that invites criticism, “being brave and bold”. Also personal things, “anything can help the impression of who you are” and the way one express himself on a weblog. For him, interaction on his weblog played an important role in this process: “there is something special about somebody coming to your place to leave their words there “.

However, he said that “if I really want to get to know another person, I have to change into personal channels to have a more secure exchange which is not public, to be vulnerable” “Once you become an A-lister, it becomes difficult to keep the openness and vulnerability…”

On the types of people connected to via weblogs

He told that blogging connected him to a “very diverse group of people” – young/old, coming from different backgrounds. He also noted that those people are “somewhat diverse and not diverse at the same time” as “there is a certain attitude of expecting diversity, expecting other perspectives”. In this diversity “there is a set of shared values which appear to be pretty global”. He says that this diversity is “something special about blogs”.

• Blog networking study: non-personal relations and lurking
• Blog networking study: choosing channels
• KM Europe

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

***

Luis works at IBM as social software evangelist. He is located in Spain, but travels frequently for his work.

He blogs since 2003, first two years internally at IBM (as a KM manager then) and in public since 2005. Between other things he is known for his experiment with eliminating work-related email.

He says his internal weblog has started to show “how blogging can make a difference” inside the company and it worked well in that respect. While blogging internally, he followed a few KM weblogs and engaged in what he calls “half-way conversation” – he linked to them and commented, but they couldn’t see it. He talks about the need to have proper conversations, to become one of KM bloggers, “to build up a community of people to share”, “to help me to position myself as a thought leader within the field”.

He adds how blog creates an online presence for him, it is way for “establishing yourself within a network of people who share the same interests” and “eventually meeting up in person”. He gives an example of people who approach him at events because they know him from blogging. While some people may “freak out” when others know so much about them, Luis finds it “fascinating”. He says “that person gets my attention full at that moment” because “they took the effort to read what I write”.

When he started blogging, his (internal) network of KM people was active, but relatively small. Blogging expanded it to other communities, other business units. We also discuss how blogging helps to breaks barriers – hierarchical, organisational, geographical, time zone. He says that activities that he was engaged into as a result of blogging tripled…He became more visible as a KM leader, getting more visible place within the company and better understanding of the rest of the company.

He had similar changes with his external weblogs, however “a bit slower” as it takes time to “build a reputation”. “The impact has been more significant”. He gives an example of one of KM bloggers saying “when I think about IBM, I think Luis”. “It allowed me to have a public face, a public voice”

“They allowed me to position myself in a KM blogosphere, to share what we were doing internally and how we were doing. A public voice of KM in IBM.” This turned into “a whole bunch of relationships”.

“I feel being part of the community of passionate people around KM.[...] I’m not longer alone. Many people in most companies were facing the same issues I was facing. Sharing those experiences was a tremendous experience – that’s why I’m still blogging”.

Roles weblog plays in networking

“Weblog is crucial to allow people to build up an opinion without knowing you”. Luis compares weblog to an “internet business card”, that not only tells “who you are and what you do”, but also allows to “get an introduction of your community” by seeing who comments. He emphasises how important is engaging with others who comment on a weblog – “last thing you can do is to ignore your comments. I hear from people ‘I’m a big fun out your blog because you reply back’”.

“Weblogs allow you to get beyond what people publish and to get as sense of what a person is like”. “to build a profile of a person as a person”, not a “business entity”. “Not how long you have been married, but how people write articles”. “When you write a blogpost you are giving yourself out as a person”. He adds, “the line between life and work is going to disappear”.

Later weblogs “consolidate the initial contacts”. He says that it’s more in trackbacks and cross-linking between blogs than in comments. He 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”.

Linking conversations between blogs helps to “corroborate what someone else said” while also adding own experiences and sharing with others. “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 talks about the sense of community that emerges thought those interactions

Forming of a community via weblogs is much slower than you could have e.g. with social networking site, as “you don’t constantly bombard them with the updates”. He says that building those connections takes time, but they are “the most ever lasting”, since “people understand the hard work that goes into weblog post”. He emphasizes that blogging is not an overnight success, it takes time and effort. For him his weblog is a central part of his online presence, “social networking sites come and go, your blog won’t”.

When we talked how blogging helps in getting things done work-wise, Luis says that blogging lays a foundation, building trust “which is crucial for collaboration”. He also gives an example of the role of his internal weblog in getting “last three jobs” once he announced in his weblog that he was ready for new challenges. He adds “Your never know when you are going to be unemployed. Start blogging now.”

What is difficult with weblogs is the embedding blogging into the workflow of day to day interactions. While email is part of work, blogging still feels as an extra work.

Blogging in comparison to other tools

Blogging is a “powerful way to build up your personal brand”; “you don’t get it from social networking site, there you are just one of many people”. Blogging allows “to tell the world who you are”, to share passion. In a weblog it is also possible to “expand without bugging people”, so the readers can decide what and how much they want to read. What Twitter does (and blog doesn’t) is providing a space to share “titbits what I’m doing”, “ambient intimacy”. “Weblog is for an elaborate thought. Twitter for building social capital”. He talks about enhancing his connection with KM bloggers by knowing about their day to day life from Twitter.

Talking about different tools he tells about the risks of “spreading yourself too thin”, since it take effort to maintain one’s presence, adding that if he would have to choose one tool, it would be his weblog – “most of my hard work went into there”. For him “blogging is more a long-term commitment towards yourself and your personal brand”. “Twitter is like you treat acquaintances, blog is how you treat good friends”.

For Luis blog “is an essential tool”, not only as a personal KM system, but as a way to manage connections.

• Dave Snowden
• Blog networking study: establishing and maintaining relations via blogging
• Blog networking study: choosing channels

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

***

I think of Gabriela as a “travelling researcher”: Romanian by origin, she spent last few years working in research positions in Germany, Luxembourg and Ireland. At the moment of the interview she works as a research fellow in University of Limerick, studying collaboration in distributed software development. She didn’t know many KM people prior to blogging, except of those she met at the conferences she attended.

She started blogging in 2002, maintaining a project blog; started personal blog in Romanian in 2003 and a work-related blog in English in 2004, after attending a conference where she met other bloggers. She says her network started to change after that conference – she connected with KM bloggers and started to read weblogs intensively, “up to 100 blogs”.

She immediately comments that it is different now – not only there are more potentially interesting weblogs out there, but with new tools appearing her habits changed. She keeps an eye on people via microblogging (Twitter and Jaiku) and other tools, picking up their weblogs once in a while to read in more detail. She gives an example of Jack Vinson, KM blogger she’s never met, but says they are mutually connected on different channels.

She doesn’t worry about missing important stuff – “Trusting people to bring the new, if it’s important it will come back.”

Gabriela tells that the extension of her network via blogging is not KM-only – she got connected to educators, Irish blogosphere, start-up blogs. “It helped me to integrate in this environment. People bring the world to me because they are travelling, for example, developments of social software in the States.” Says how reading Romanian blogs helps her to know what’s happening in Romania.

As she adds later, blogs represent the different interests of their authors – “Most of the times I read them for KM, but find something else”. She told about blogs expanding her knowledge in several directions. For example, she reads German and Friench blogs to maintain her language skills (struggling to read Irish blogs too) or “a bunch of IBMers who blog externally” for her study of the company.

For her, meeting in person and connecting via weblogs are interrelated – she goes to and tries to organise blogger meet-ups to meet with those she knows via weblogs, but also gets to know new bloggers that way.

What blogs are good for, networking-wise

Comparing to Twitter that provides awareness of others’ “travel, readings, connections”, blogs provide more context and reflection. They provide a “sort of business card or a CV”, so “when you meet then you know where to start the conversation”. She tells about checking weblogs to find information about people prior to meeting them. Other weblogs she reads regularly as she is interested in what their authors say or to keep up with friends. She gives an example of former colleagues who are following her weblog to find what is happening in her life, sending emails only when she seems to have a hard time. Amazed of non-bloggers, who are following her “because we are friends”.

Gabriela tells that she blogged only on professional issues in her English weblog, leaving the comments on her personal life for her Romanian weblog, “intentionally trying to keep it separate”. She got a feedback from others who wanted to see more personal details, so she added more personal things to the weblog. At a certain moment she couldn’t blog about work (doing field studies with IBM) as “smallest detail can provoke some damage”, so she wrote about events and trips instead.

She is aware of people using her weblog to find more about her. She gives the example of the job interview for her current job, where her boss knew a lot of things about her from the weblog. However, she says, “I never had a bad experience with exposing myself through my blog. I didn’t fell threatened. I’m a bit annoyed by the fact that social tools are getting more and more aggregated.”

She talks about bloggers she connected to as “permanent support network”, “a sort of fraternity” – “you know you can tap into the knowledge of fellow bloggers without having to provide any details”. Weblogs support collaboration, by helping to discover common interests and shared context that is already there.

When she needs to contact someone “email or twitter is the easiest way”, she would not doing it via the weblog, which is “slower”. “When I don’t need a quick answer and its something related to a blogpost, I leave a comment or write a post myself. If I have a concrete idea and want to put it in practice now, I use other tools”.

She also talks about new tools taking apart some of the information that appeared on the weblog before, for example travel plans that moved to Dopplr. She is concerned about the fragmentation of information about a person that used to be all in a weblog and the need to find and “follow” them when they move part of their activities to other channels.

She tells that meeting a new interesting person usually results in searching for them and connecting on different social networking platforms. “Without being given any details [...] people go and see what they can find out there. People Google each other. People connect the missing dots, and find you. After attending an event I usually have ten requests [to connect].”

However, she tells, there is also a problem of different audiences collapsing. She experimented with using Jaiku in her teaching last year, but now the students are following her on other channels as well and picking up all kinds of personal details about her. “These are your students who are judging you in a different way, you have to be aware that they know who you are and where you go.”

• Blog networking study: interviews
• Blog networking study: non-personal relations and lurking
• Dave Snowden

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

***

Euan is an independent advisor for social computing for business. He started blogging with his personal weblog The Obvious? in early 2001, while working as a head of KM in BBC. As a result of his position he was pretty well connected in KM prior to blogging.

On networking and changes in it as a result of blogging

He notes that he has never been “consciously cultivating a network, just meeting people, remembering people, staying in touch with people”, but adds “as I became more aware of the online ways of doing that it became a skill worth cultivating”.

“I have a problem of talking about knowledge management and my use of networking for knowledge management. [...] I think when people use… almost consciously use those things for an outcome makes them go wrong. I think you become interested in things, you become interested in people. I became interested in knowledge management and I talked to people about what we called knowledge management in those days. So I’m resisting the idea of abstracting the activity from the purpose if you like.”

When he started blogging his network “has exploded”, bridging geographical and organisational boundaries: “I only have so much face-to-face time available on the planet and I want to make a best use of that. And previously I was subject to geographical constraints or social constraints or organisational constraints as of who I was likely to meet and suddenly with online networks I’ve been able to connect to [...] the whole bunch of interesting and interested people whom I suddenly had an access to in a way in a normal life I would never ever had that chance. I could then establish relationships and (and again something I get very hot about) is that these are 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.”

“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.

So that ability to seek out, build some sort of trust relationship and then eventually (not necessarily, but potentially) then meet face to face people who are interesting, useful, helpful, and friendly towards me makes just a huge difference.”

Why weblogs work that way?

Weblogs are passionate. Also, “there is something about the size of the chunks that we write [...] something about the pacing and the size of the blogging window, two or three paragraph idea that’s weighty enough [...] That’s why I still blog even if I have Twitter: you can put more thoughts into a blogpost. You are expressing something hopefully slightly more profound about yourself and your ideas.

And the permalinks is another big thing – each of those little ideas could be linked to and that allows to distribute sense-making networks.”

Later in a conversation we talked about developing trust and he said: “You can pick up little subliminal or subconscious or peripheral bits and pieces about people through what they write, how they write, how their blog looks, how they react to things .” He then discussed parallels between bloggers engaging in an interaction in weblog comments and someone’s behaviour in an f2f conversation.

Blogging helps in discovering interesting content and people: “it’s a collective pointing that helps to find stuff, once you have an established group of bloggers you read and trust. And their ability to find a good stuff to point to it, increases your signal to noise ratio on the web “. “Blogs do that better than other tools because of the context – you have to say why that is important, why are you pointing to something”.

Then our discussion turned to getting things done via weblogs. Euan suggests weblogs are good for supportive activities: “in a sense of establishing, sharing [...] they are great tools, probably better than face to face”, however, “in a context of making something happen there is a limit to how far you can go.”

Weblogs have a different rhythm. “If you want to set up a meeting you wouldn’t pontificate about life, universe and the such…[as you do on a weblog]” I tried suggesting that that it might be the confidential nature of work in many cases, but he didn’t pick it up suggesting that “inside and outside [of an organisation] are getting debatable anyway…”

On dealing with expanding network

“The relationships that these tools enable don’t scale”. “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.”

He also commented that now it’s different from the moment when he started blogging. Then the interactions were “more intense”: “we had much more time to read each other posts because it was fewer of us”. He also talked about reading other blog via RSS reader and how this strips them of the context visible on a webpage. “It weakened the ties, which is a shame.” However, he added that now there is more “breadth and diversity”: “to be blunt it was people interested in blogging about blogging, now there are much more people talking in different ways about interesting things”. He adds that blogging “became more infrastructure less something we talk about”.

When I asked about the danger of forming “echochamber”, where likeminded bloggers connect, he told about his own interests to “be provoked to think differently”. 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.

On the influence and the image others construct of a blogger

“It’s not the number of people that read your weblog, but the leverage you have on them”.

Euan talks about the time of starting to work on his own and making his weblog a main source of information about his work. Deciding against becoming “more guarded” as “it’s better if people know what I’m thinking before starting to pay me”. “I’ve got high degree of accountability, because I’m highly visible, every time I screw up it’s going to be visible to the whole world”. He talked about blogging as building his own brand: “it’s horrible phrasing, but it’s what is happening. Which is probably more powerful and really scary at the same time.”

Euan gives an example of someone he works with who does not have a weblog: “He is using twitter and some other things… It feels like miasma – I’ve got nowhere I can point people to because he doesn’t got a blog and the other bits are too dispersed. So it’s like a core, a gravitational pull”.

He also noted how blogging made him more reflective, “it makes you more aware about the world and your interactions with it. That I find really exciting.”

On blogging in business settings

Eaun talks about the challenges of blogging in a case when individuals are exposed to an audience “only in controlled circumstances”. He talks about writing while in BBC: “You can generalize the topic that it stays interesting without compromising anything.”

“All of the tools allow connections. [...] In terms networking and ability to build relationships [...] blogs are the most important and most powerful. And in many cases one of the most difficult to do in a work context. [...] They rely on you having an opinion and expressing it and it’s not ironically easy to do in a work context. [...] It’s also personal side of it, people in business still have a problem with ‘social’. And yet being social is how you create relationships and all businesses are based on relationships.”

• Blog networking study: non-personal relations and lurking
• Blog networking study: establishing and maintaining relations via blogging
• Gabriela Avram