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.

***

Blogging provides opportunities for both, building strong personal connections and establishing other, non-personal relations, those that Nancy calls “information relations” and Shawn addresses as “not ties”. While providing an opportunity to “keep an eye on things” (Dave) those relations do not require as much effort and commitment as goes into personal relations. Anoush, reacting to the summary of the interview with Nancy, discusses this aspect in her weblog:

In this interview, Nancy talks about information relationships vs human relationships emerging as a result of blogging. The notion of information relationships is that blogs allow to connect in a meaningful way to a wide range of people and their ideas without necessarily engaging with them on a personal level – as Nancy says “trust in what they are producing, which may have nothing to do with trust in them as a human being”.

I like this concept, and this quote formulates very well what I have been thinking about as the liberating aspect of the sorts of instrumental, utilitarian (in the good sense) social networks that can develop in the blogosphere.

When I think about various types of aggregations of indviduals and knowledge – groups, communities, network, and the collective – I always have a bit of a problem, a sense of discomfort, with the notion of “community”.   For me, “community” – in the social as well as learning-related sense – has always had something oppressive about it, like being stuck in a village where everyone gossips about everyone else and where there is a pressure to fit in, to fully participate.

In contrast, information/knowledge networks you can form in blogosphere do not require such full engagement on such a personal level.  I am not an avid blogger myself (this blog is very new and I am still trying to get into the habit of writing regularly). However, over years, I have accumulated a list of around 50 blogs that I read/scan daily.  In most of the cases, I don’t know the authors personally, and with many of them I have never had a conversational exchange, yet I feel I know them professionally, their ideas have shaped mine, they helped and are helping me every day tremendously to learn and feel intelectually connected and stimulated, not to mention helping me find, filter and evaluate resources for my research (books, papers, etc).

Although Anoush contrasts blogging networks and communities, the function of “information relations” between bloggers is not that different from lurking in communities (Nonnecke & Preece, 2003): they provide an opportunity to learn without the exposure and the effort that interaction requires.

However, there are differences as well. In a community learning through lurking is likely to be about the community itself or the domain that it is focused on. In a case of a weblog readers are exposed to as many domains as the author decides to cover, creating more opportunities for learning across boundaries than possible in a community setting. This learning is also person-centric: observing writing of a single person over time helps to develop trust in “what the blogger is producing” and a feeling of “knowing her professionally”.

• Large social network imposes an higher attention degree on what goes on worldwide
• Food and bloggers coming Sunday
• Artefacts of a weblog-mediated relationship: a visualisation

Alexander is getting into a period then he is interested in everything else but his own toys. We usually give him any safe household object within arms reach and he happily explores it. He prefers to eat grass and leaves and not the food we put in front of him… He has been always curious to see people, but till recently couldn’t stand too much noise and too crowded parties (which made our networking at Reboot a bit more challenging :). However, last weekend it changed – he actually preferred crowded family party to quiet walking in a garden.

All that gives a new meaning to the concept of legitimate peripheral participation: not living separate, “baby” life, but soaking the details of life as other people know it. In this respect I really like the point of The continuum concept on babies being in a middle of activities of their parents (despite of some other concerns with the book).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/08/28.html#a1939; comments are here.

• The first dress
• Alexander
• Officially I should be back to work

I’m in the middle of writing deadlines, so just a piece from Life between buildings that was hanging in my blogging notes for ages:

At the edge of the forest or near the façade, once is less exposed than if one is out in the middle of a space. One is not in the way of anyone or anything. One can see, but not be seen too much, and the personal territory is reduced to a semicircle in front of the individual. When one’s back is protected, others can approach only frontally, making it easy to keep watch and to react, for example, by means of a forbidding facial expressions in the event of undesired invasion of personal territory.

The edge zone offers a number of obvious practical and psychological advantages as a place to linger. Additionally, the area along the façade is the obvious outdoor staying area for the residents and functions of the surrounding buildings. It is relatively easy to move a function out of the house to the zone along the façade. The most natural place to linger is the doorstep, from which it is possible to go farther out into the space or remain standing. Both physically and psychologically it is easier to remain standing than to move out into the space. One can always more farther later on, if desired.

It can be concluded that events grow from inward, from the edge toward the middle of public spaces.

When I read this one as a well as lots of examples of places people choose for hanging out in public, it becomes clear that the edge between purely personal and private “my” space and truly social “our” space is important. This is the space for observing, making choices and getting ready to step out into social engagement. This is also the space in between that is so often missing or neglected. I’m thinking of “old” technologies that support either you personally (all stuff that runs on the desktop) or what ever group with shared activity (all kinds of groupware stuff). Being there just to observe before jumping in is lurking and often it’s not considered to be a good behaviour…

I guess it’s a bit cryptic, but if you read me long enough you probably able to connect the dots. Otherwise just wait till words around ideas mature and mould into something readable…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/06/03.html#a1580; comments are here.

• Middlespace: predicting and managing bottom-up processes
• Swiss Pattada
• Changing blogging platform

A piece from the paper:

An individual weblog is not likely to represent a community, while shared social spaces seem to emerge between weblogs, like in a city where life between buildings accounts for many social activities of its inhabitants. As in cities, blogger communal spaces are not evenly distributed: some neighbourhoods are full of social activities and conversations, while others look like a random collocation of houses where inhabitants have nothing in common. Blogger communal spaces may have visible boundaries, but more often indicators of a community are subtle and is difficult for a non-member to distinguish. Just as a local garden is not likely to have a sign indicating that there is a chess-player community that inhabits it every Sunday, blog communities do not delineate obvious community boundaries.

Somehow city metaphor was hitting me hard during last half a year…

I guess it’s started from A city is not a tree. Then it was reading Emergence and talkings about communities, shared spaces and weblog reading at BlogWalk 2.0, Ton’s post on founding a City in Cyberspace, Torill‘s Dialogue in slow motion at BlogTalk.

And a post by Anna Vallgårda pointing to Life between buildings by Jan Gehl… Just a quote from this book:

Life between buildings offers an opportunity to be with others in a relaxed and undemanding way. One can take occasional walks, perhaps make a detour along a main street on the way home or pause at an inviting bench near a front door to be among people for a short while. One can take a long bus ride every day, as many retired people have been found to do in large cities. Or one can do daily shopping, even though it practical to do it once a week. Even looking out of the window now and then, if one is fortunate enough to have something to look at, can be rewarding. Being among others, seeing and hearing others, receiving impulses from others, imply positive experiences, alternatives to being alone. One is not necessarily with a specific person, but one is, nevertheless, with others.

As opposed to being a passive observer of other people’s experiences on television or video or film, in public spaces the individual himself is present, participating in a modest way, but most definitely participating.

And it’s got connected with lurking, degrees of strength in relation building and some others things that I can’t articulate yet…

This post also appears on channel BlogWalk

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/15.html#a1429; comments are here.

• BlogTalk 2.0: Panel 4 – blog adoption and blog communities
• Ideal intellectual communities
• Skype: joined the club

There was something in my drafted posts from January… Something about lurkers vs. creators.

Stephen Downes: Blogging Without Writing

One tenth of one percent of the people write publicly. Well, OK, I can’t validate this figure, but it has been a rule of thumb for me for about a decade. If you have a thousand readers on your Website, one person will post regularly to the discussion board. If you have a thousand mailing list subscribers, one person will post the bulk of the messages. If you have a thousand Internet users, one person will create (and maintain) a blog (people may observe that two percent of Internet users currently blog, but I see this as an indication of the scale of the coming shrinkage of the blog community).

Jonathan Smith: With this medium I am reading much more than I am posting.

Just a few questions related to it:

Is it true that blogging is more about reading than writing? I guess so.

Is is true that % of active bloggers (blog writers) is so low? Is there any way to find how many blog readers are there (especially given the blurring line between weblogs and other types of online publishing/communication; also – when you write you know that this is a weblog, but your readers may not know)?

Do the numbers of active participants say something about general ratios between creation/consumption? I wonder what if we assume everyone is (wants to be) a creator, but this is not the case…

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/07.html#a1157; comments are here.

• Blogging about disabilities
• Comparing weblog text to the PhD dissertation via tagclouds
• Time in blogging: writers time and readers time

I’m looking for any existing research on learning effects of web browsing.

I’m interested most in incidental and implicit learning, learning about things we were not going to learn and learning that we are not aware of. For example, I may browse through A-list blogs in search of specific information, but on the way I learn who is who, who fights and befriends with whom, learn about events they are invited to, pick up a couple of memes, learn what’s hot about RSS and Atom, find out about Dave’s new design, etc.

Of course, it connects with my interests on lurking and weblog reading :)

So far I found only Incidental learning during information retrieval: A hypertext experiment, which is 15 years old. May be I just don’t know right terminology to search for :) Any recommendations are welcome…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/02/28.html#a1099; comments are here.

• Reading priorities
• Can I have tags instead of folders with my RSS feeds as well?
• Weblog conversation tracking tool

I’m still thinking about the power of lurking. My interest was triggered by discussions about activating lurkers in on-line communities and by some of our research suggesting that for many people lurking and not active participation is enough to get what they need. Since then I’m on a trail :)

I found some research on lurking (thanks to the great work done at CPsquare – Let’s get more positive about the term ‘lurker’ (.pdf)). You can check my del.icio.us links on lurking or go directly to the papers by Blair Nonnecke and start reading from Silent participants: Getting to know lurkers better (.pdf).

I would blog it properly, but it’s a bit late, so you can enjoy it yourself. I’ll be back with my thoughts on it.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/02/01.html#a1066; comments are here.

• Learning: communities vs. courses
• KMSS03: Knowledge networks and communities
• Single community space: why communities are usually tied to one technology?

Stephen Downes in 2004: The Turning Point

Blogging Without Writing

One tenth of one percent of the people write publicly. Well, OK, I can’t validate this figure, but it has been a rule of thumb for me for about a decade. If you have a thousand readers on your Website, one person will post regularly to the discussion board. If you have a thousand mailing list subscribers, one person will post the bulk of the messages. If you have a thousand Internet users, one person will create (and maintain) a blog (people may observe that two percent of Internet users currently blog, but I see this as an indication of the scale of the coming shrinkage of the blog community).

Jonathan Smith: With this medium I am reading much more than I am posting.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/31.html#a1062; comments are here.

• Blogging as lurking
• Research on lurking
• Edges

I’m thinking about “core” vs. “fringe” in a community and at this moment it’s more about a “fringe”… As far as I know there is not enough attention paid to legitimate peripheral participation in communities, to the “learning” and “belonging” effects of lurking (I may be missing something here, any pointers are welcome).

As I wrote before, there is a great value of an on-line community as a content provider: it could be a small group generating most of the discussions, but many people can benefit from finding and learning from them. I wonder what lurkers do in a community, how their activities (“passive” reading is an activity as well :) and effects of those activities can be accounted for and what role lurkers play in a community dynamics. I believe there are some hidden treasures there :)

And as usual, my questions have to do something not only with communities, but with blogging as well: regular reading of a weblog is a sort of “lurking” that creates similar effects of awareness of what’s going on and “silent” learning.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/05.html#a890; comments are here.

• Beginners-friendly communities
• KMSS02: Day 2. Communities of practice
• WBC04: selected

From Interview with Etienne Wenger on Communities of Practice, about “how to involve everybody” (in the Knowledge Board context):

The combination of a core group and a lurker group is a pattern we have observed in most communities and I am not sure that you would spend your energy most efficiently by trying to get everybody to contribute in the same way. It is more important to have an energized core group that attracts more and more people into it. And of course you will face the question of size but most core groups that go beyond a certain size naturally evolve into sub-groups. Then it’s a matter of how you connect these sub-groups with one another by having people that act as brokers between the sub-groups, for instance, some kind of co-ordinating groups that make sure that if something important comes up in one group it is also understood by the others; or by having events organised by one sub-group but open to everyone.

If you are thinking of growing the groups, grow them from the inside. Don’t try to pull everybody in; increase the intensity of conversation at the level of the core groups. Now, to find ways to involve new voices is very important. You may want to create an event or encourage some people to take on some new responsibility. Sure, but still, having everyone in one big core group is neither realistic, nor necessarily useful because not everybody has the same level of interest. And if you have 5,000 members who all contribute the same, it will be just overwhelming.

Last week I joined Knowledge Board discussion at KM Europe. Raising the level of the community members activity of was one of the issues raised there. What I found out interesting is that (according to the survey) only 30% of members participate in discussions. I guess the number of people in core group is much lower.

I don’t know if it’s good or bad: many people say that Knowledge Board is a good source of information and staying updated, and they don’t want to engage in conversations using it. I’m wondering why being non-active is percieved as bad? Why do we want to make (corporate) communities more active? And is there a limit for meaningful activities?

I don’t know. I know that we don’t want a dead, not talking, community. But I also know that we don’t want conversations for the sake of conversations. May be we should let those who join a community to stay updated to do it this way. I wonder where is the border line that says: this community is active enough, you don’t need to promote more activities…

Just a work-related thinking…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/19.html#a842; comments are here.

• CoPs people are becoming aware of weblogs value
• Blog networking study: non-personal relations and lurking
• Books on-line