Had a nice opportunity today to update my Dutch and my knowledge of KM research in NL at KM day “Made in Holland”. Hopefully will blog a bit more tomorrow, but these are some resources in relation to my talk on blogging and KM.

Slides: .ppt

What was in the talk (so you don’t have to check it if you saw some of the things already):

• Highlights from Microsoft employee blogging study
  • Efimova, L. & Grudin, J. (2007). Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging. Proceedings of the Fortieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press.
• Personal vs. business dimensions/choices
  • Blog posts 1, 2, 3 + ECSCW’07 talk
• Implications for KM
  • I should blog it soon.See ‘Beyond blogging’
    lessons learnt for a starting point.

Also:

• Author-centred vs. topic-centred blogging

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/13.html#a1952; comments are here.

• Wiki as a data collection instrument
• Hidden agenda
• Blogs for developing language skills

Just came across and couldn’t resist quoting :)

Alex Barnett on why moving his blog from Microsoft blog server to his own:

Well, there’s something about knowing that your thoughts are hosted on your employer’s infrastructure that I think has tended to constrain my writing somewhat – not much, but enough to be aware of it as I blog. And not because of company policy (i.e. ‘blog smart’).

While on MSDN, I always got a slight guilty feeling whenever I posted about purely personal or technical but non-Microsoft related stuff. I know there are bunch of posts I’ve written or wanted to write but didn’t because I’m on ‘official’ territory.

Does that mean that my personal thoughts to be published on my new blog can’t be intepreted as the words of a Microsoft employee, just because they live on my personal domain? No, I’m not thinking that at all.

If there’s one thing we’re all learning as ‘Microsoft bloggers’ is that what you write is considered a view of a Microsoft employee and therefore is quoteable and abusable as evidence of Microsoft’s position on a matter. It doesn’t matter how much you point out disclaimers (ah, that reminds me! I should add one to my personal blog…) that “your views are you own and not those of your employers’ “, that fact it is that it is the perception that counts. Even as I write this post and know that I’m publishing from my new blog on a non-Microsoft-owned site, I am aware of my contractual agreement with my employer, I am aware the information that I know of but can’t share publicly and the conversations with colleagues that cannot be made public. While at Microsoft, Robert Scoble and others regularly reminded us of that. This exit video of Scoble on Channel 9 is must-see viewing for any blogger in my view (most people are employed by somebody) – he talks about the fact that everytime he blogged he was very aware of the associated risks. I was sad to see him go – he taught me and the rest of us a lot about this topic. The fact that you might think that I’m writing ‘on behalf of Microsoft’ (which is not the case :-P ) is a fact that any blogging employee of any company needs to be mindful of. Blog smart in other words.

In relation to several things: the importance of weblog location, affiliation and attribution in Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging, ongoing thinking on how to incorporate quotes from weblogs next to anonymous interview quotes and an abstract for Methods of blog research: Behind the scenes – possible panel(s) for AoIR 2007.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/12/13.html#a1870; comments are here.

• Weblogs from a business perspective
• Blogs: individual + networking
• Preparing your armors?

Raymond Chen has written a book on the evolution of Windows based on his weblog. What I find interesting is how much this quote (I guess from the book introduction, here) is similar to some of the reasons to blog I heard from other Microsoft bloggers:

What will the reader get out of this book? As noted above, the primary goal is to convey the philosophy and rational behind what might at first appear to be an irrational design. The reader will also understand that when something can’t be done in Windows, it’s often for a good reason as well as appreciate the lengths to which Windows goes in preserving backwards compatibility (and why it’s important that it do so). And if nothing else, the reader will be able to tell amusing stories about Windows history at cocktail parties. That is, cocktail parties thrown by other geeks.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/12/12.html#a1869; comments are here.

• Business blogs: consulting
• What do you want to know about weblogs at Microsoft?
• Writing PhD dissertation

One of the things I’m trying to do is to figure out how to talk about work-related blogging given that this is something in between personal and business interests. A weblog by someone who works for a company (=talking about employee blogging here) could be anything between my personal diary that doesn’t have to do anything with my work and it’s not really me blogging, but my work.

To position a weblog I’m thinking of using a scale between personal and business (re: personal vs. organisational perspectives ). However, a scale by itself is not enough: in case of blogging about work decision-making is multidimensional.

Below is an attempt to identify the dimensions of choices on personal vs. business scale (a lot of it comes from the Microsoft data, but I tried to generalise based on my own experiences and other sources). Personal and business columns describe the extremes, the middle one includes examples of how different interests could mix.

From what I’ve seen so far most of the tensions around employee blogging are in the middle. A weblog purely on personal end is not likely to be very interesting for a company (I can’t think of any business benefits or risks in that case ;). Something purely on business side I wouldn’t call a weblog at all (biased by my own definition of a weblog), but in this case benefits and risks are defined by the way a company works.

Some dimensions are interrelated. E.g. if you blog as part of your job you are likely to do it at work time; if your weblog is on a corporate server you don’t have full technology control and anyone can easily figure out the affiliation, but a configuration for any specific blogger is likely to be different (an example of my weblog).

Does this whole thing makes sense given your own experiences? Did I miss any important dimensions?

UPDATE In case you want to try it for your own weblog: use empty image or .xls file. Don’t forget to link back or let me know in some other way :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/17.html#a1854; comments are here.

• Making choices
• My PhD research in 12 slides
• PhD is just a bumpy road, sooner or later I’ll be there

Slides for my talk at SHiFT (could be updated with last moment changes :) – Blogging on the edge: between personal passions, work practices and business risks

More on the research on blogging at Microsoft

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/09/28.html#a1836; comments are here.

• Telling your boss about your blog
• Studying weblogs at Microsoft: connecting the dots
• Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging: affiliation and attribution

Just to let you know that finally some parts of the research on blogging at Microsoft are going to be published:

Efimova, L. & Grudin, J. (2007). Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging. Proceedings of the Fortieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press.

Abstract. Editors, email, and instant messaging were first widely used by students who later brought knowledge of their uses and effective practices into workplaces. Weblogs may make such a transition more quickly. We present a study of emergent blogging practices in a corporate setting. We attended meetings, read email, documents, and weblogs, and interviewed 38 people—bloggers, infrastructure administrators, attorneys, public relations specialists, and executives. We found an experimental, rapidly-evolving terrain marked by growing sophistication about balancing personal, team, and corporate incentives and issues.

The paper is going to appear in a company of other interesting papers at HICSS’07, but unfortunately I can’t be there myself.

I promised not to make it public till beginning of November (will add a link then!), but if you can always email me for a copy. The feedback is appreciated very much – I’m thinking of a follow-up journal publication.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/09/26.html#a1834; comments are here.

• ‘Beyond blogging’ lessons learnt
• Tools to find similarity between two texts (weblog and papers)
• PhD blogging and paper writing

Today at 10:15 (GMT+1) I’m speaking on blogging and work at HUMlab. There is a streaming video and you should be able to Skype in.

One of my broader interests is to understand what happens when emergent technologies (like blogs or wikis) come to a workplace. What happens to passion and lack of central control enabling those tools when they collide with boundaries, rules and business interests of an organization?

During this seminar I present the results of my study of weblogs at Microsoft and focus on the dilemmas faced by a blogger employed by a big company, changes in working practices and relationships because of blogging, as well as the implications of those. I also interlay it with the examples from my own experiences of blogging research to illustrate that many of those dilemmas and changes apply to academic environments as well.

• Acrhived video stream (Real Media)
• Podcast (.mp3)
• Slides
• Skype in – humlab-seminar

Related: Author-centred vs. topic-centred blogging, details on studying weblogs at Microsoft and relevant blog posts.

Also: I say it in the talk, but it makes sense to put in writing – “don’t blog on Fridays” in the title comes from comments by one anonymous reviewer of the paper to be published, who picked it up in the text and suggested that it would make a good title. I agree (as with many other comments that helped to move the work further).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/23.html#a1819; comments are here.

• Knowledge workers redefined: responsibility and creating value by acting on knowledge
• PhD is done
• ECSCW07 workshop on social software – Employee blogging: personal or work-related?

Robert Scoble comments on the story of a UK blogger in France being fired for blogging.

As usual, the things I find interesting are not on the topic, but around it – this time it’s about the role of a blogger’s manager:

If your boss doesn’t know you’re doing it, that should set off alarm bells right there. Talking online WILL get back to your boss. Unless you are so freaking careful to make sure you stay anonymous (like MiniMicrosoft, Microsoft’s anonymous blogger, has so far). This person obviously didn’t stay anonymous enough. It’s why I don’t advise anyone try the anonymous route: either be straight up with your boss and everyone, or stay off the Internet.

[cut half of the post]

Anytime you are identifyable with your company you’ve gotta be professional about your behavior. It’s why at Microsoft we said the policy was ‘be smart.’ That roughly translated to ‘don’t piss off your boss.’

Of course, the point is where to draw the line: telling your boss about all your activities online doesn’t make sense and the boundary between blogging about personal life and work is often sooo blurred…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/20.html#a1803; comments are here.

• Talk at IBM: Blogging for knowledge workers
• Using blogs in business
• Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging: other bloggers

While reading a research report for the study where I was one of the respondents I realised that even while my quotes were identified with a nickname there would be quite some number of people who could figure out it was me if they get to read the whole thing…

This is something I has been struggling in my own research as well. Simple: when I report on interviews with bloggers shall I add a (nick)name to every quote/fact?

On one hand, it dramatically improves readability of the research results – readers could reconstruct what different characters were saying and how different aspects of their story connect to each other. On another hand, this is exactly something that compromises their privacy: sometimes you don’t need a name to recognise that the story told in the research report is associated with a specific person.

Sometimes you don’t need the whole story. In one of my interviews with Microsoft bloggers I brought in an opposing opinion of another respondent (“some people say so and so”) to get into a discussion on why differences were there. The respondent immediately identified the name of the person I tried to hide…

This could be just an exception, but I’m pretty sure that if I let quotes to be accompanied by nicknames (=allowing to trace that they belong to the same person) then many of the personalities behind them could be easily identified by their peers (and I’m not talking about the fact that I can’t quote anything from the respondents’ blogs – that gives them away immediately).

It doesn’t make a big issue when “the field” you study and “the academic audience” you write for are far apart, so the chances of someone from the field reading the results of the study is low. However, it’s not the case with my research – a weblog reveals personality and the blogosphere is interconnected enough, I choose to study lead users who often have an interest in the results and I actually find important reaching them – the chances that my respondents or people who can identify them read the results are pretty high.

And, while I’m strfuggling with my writing choices I have a book suggestion for those who feel like diving into these issues further: When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography. So far this was the best to put my own experiences and thinking into perspective. I will blog it one day (if I’m bad this will not happen before writing the related section of my dissertation :)

Related from another angle: Weblog research ethics – 1, 2 3

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/11.html#a1799; comments are here.

• Shout if you want to be heard or Technorati blog finder
• Methodology chapter: posting parts online
• Meeting imaginary friend

Just have to do something with all those open windows before continuing working :)

On Robert Scoble’s role as an aggregator:

Nick Bradbury: Now, once Robert moves on, what single source are we supposed to read when we want to find out about new stuff that Microsoft is doing, without all the marketing?

Niall Kennedy: What does the news mean for Microsoft? More people in large companies now realize the value of an information aggregator for internal and external communication. In a 60,000 person company you need some internal connectors to help keep teams and projects working together and benefitting from the work and knowledge of others. If Microsoft does not already have a team or teams dedicated to internal corporate development, hopefully they’ll realize the value and create such a team.

And an example of a feedback loop via blogging:

Yesterday I got cranky with Microsoft about a long-standing bug in a Microsoft library that was causing problems for some FeedDemon customers. As you can imagine, I was frustrated that my work was being compromised by a known bug in code I had no control over, so I was feeling a little punchy when I posted yesterday.

Of course, I hoped that posting about the bug would get it the attention it deserved (which it did, btw). But I didn’t think about how my cranky post would affect the Microsoft devs responsible for tackling the bug (yes, folks, they are human!). I know it’s no fun to wake up and find some blogger just made your day harder.

As you can see from the comments to my post, Microsoft is on the ball – they jumped in, asked for more information, and reactivated the bug after being able to reproduce it. I have to agree with Andy Herron that Microsoft’s reaction was impressive. So, thanks for taking my criticism in the way it was intended and for taking the time to look into the problem. I look forward to seeing this bug fixed :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/06/13.html#a1775; comments are here.

• Just an observation
• Environment vs. personal choice? (re: attribution and ownership of ideas)
• ‘Those that belong to the Emperor’ (on weblog types)