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. A few specific questions are at the end of this post.
• Statements are linked to the names of people who talked about particular issue, those might be true or not true for others.

***

Weblogs become online representations of their authors, who talk about weblogs as “the core” (Ton), “the record” (Dave), their online presence and a “long-term commitment towards yourself and your personal brand” (Luis), something that continues to represent them as they change (“I can change my job or interests, but the URL will be the same”, Martin). Euan provides an example of the role of blogging in that respect talking about 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 [the weblog] is like a core, a gravitational pull. (Euan)

The interviews bring several choices in respect to bloggers own presentation through blogging. First, they need to make themselves visible through writing to those they would (potentially) like to reach. Then they shape their writing to address the demands of different audiences that their weblogs expose them to. Finally, they just “let it be”: allowing their “true self” to be revealed through blogging and to be constructed by others.

In order to be present, to exist, bloggers need to be visible to others by writing their weblogs. For Luis the need to start blogging in public came from experiences of blogging internally and his dissatisfaction with a “half-way conversation” with KM bloggers who couldn’t see comments and links from his internal blog. He talks about the need to blog externally 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 says, “[blogging externally] allowed me to have a public face, a public voice”.

For Monica, it was important to be able to put her name on previously anonymous weblog once her authorship was discovered by a journalist and become known in her organisation. 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. She also provides an example of a need to become invisible when her former colleagues commented on her presence with them even after leaving the research group (that didn’t support her PhD aspirations), as a result of continuing to blog about her ideas:

I had mixed feelings, so I stopped posting work-related things there. [...] I felt used. (Monica)

However, writing a weblog is not enough to be present as a blogger, it is also important to use the language that potential audience will understand. Gabriela tells about creating a blog in English next to the one she wrote in Romanian to be able to connect to bloggers she met at a conference. Monica and Martin, who write primarily in Portuguese and German as a way to connect with their national audiences, talk about struggles to make choices between languages. For them connection with local audiences comes at a price of being invisible to their English-speaking network that they address once in a while by writing in English.

With a weblog one may be also present to different types of audiences: peers, existing or potential clients, and friends. Relations with those people involve different ways of writing and interacting that do not necessarily coexist well together, resulting in a need to shape the way one is represented by a weblog.

Martin provides an example by telling what led him to stop blogging 1,5 years ago, referring to the dynamics around his weblog as one of the 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. According to Martin, blogging for marketing purposes “has a different attitude and you get clash of the contexts”.

Even when blogging is supporting one’s business as in the case of Dave, it is important “not to push your ideas”:

if you say interesting things or link to interesting stuff people will come and talk to you anyway (Dave).

In additional to managing tensions that might arise around different professional uses of a weblog, there are also choices about the degree of revealing personal details of one’s life in it. While many respondents emphasizes the blurring boundaries between personal and professional, professional contacts and friends for both business in general and blogging in particular, they also limit the degree of exposing personal details in a weblog. Euan notes that weblogs “rely on you having an opinion and expressing it and it’s not the most easy thing in a work context.” Monica considers many bloggers she knows friends, not professional contacts as she observes the details of their lives that “only friends have a privilege [to see]“, however, she is also not comfortable revealing too much on her weblog: “I will not talk about myself. For me blogging and being in public are the same”.

Given the impact of blogging on one’s reputation it is tempting to think of it as a way to construct a favourable image of oneself. However, the interviews hint that while weblogs may be viewed by bloggers as their online representations, their uses in that respect may not be fully intentional and directed. Not only bloggers comment on networking as a side effect of blogging rather than an explicit purpose for it, they also seem to believe that there are limits of how much their image could be controlled.

For example, when talking about his weblog as a “trustworthy anchor point” for his clients, Ton explains that it works that way “because you can’t fake six years worth of blogging”. Dave, reacting to my comment about his experiences of presenting to big audiences says “keynote is a performance, blog is more intimate” and then tells about being surprised with “the degree you reveal yourself on the weblog”, sharing “half-formed ideas” and starting to “chat with people as they were your friends”.

Blogging under one’s own name as a professional might be one of the reasons not to “fake it” as others can eventually get into a closer contact anyway. For example, Euan tells about the temptation to become “more guarded” to address increasing business risks of blogging when getting self-employed and his decision against it: “it’s better if people know what I’m thinking before starting to pay me”. Martin, reflecting on his experiences says that now he would rather express what he thinks and “people will appear who appreciate that”.

In addition, bloggers are not only “revealing themselves” to others, but also exploring who they are, through their writing and reactions of people to it:

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. (Monica)

One can have a preferred image of oneself as a professional, but readers of a weblog construct their own anyway based on weblog writing, as, for example, with Nancy, who tells about others positioning her weblog as a “KM blog” or “educational blog”, when she doesn’t view it this way.

Participants view their weblogs as their online representations and also shape their actions accordingly. In order to “exist” for the audiences they may want to reach and potential connections to emerge bloggers not only need to be blogging, but also do it in a way connected to one’s name, continue blogging over time and written in a language that the audience can understand. While there they have to draw boundaries of what and how to include in their writing, they also let their image to be shaped by their writing and their audiences.

***

This is the part of the results that I’m most unsure of, so any comments are welcome. If you are a blogger I’d love hear how much what I say here is true for you personally.

Things that are not covered here, but would be interesting to discuss as well:

• how “my blog is my online identity” works for people with multuple blogs and mainly contributing to a multi-author blog
• how bloggers deal with addressing multiple topical audiences of their blogs – are there any struggles there?

I’m also thinking about this whole issue in respect to identity management and playing with a couple of ideas from Goffman (giving vs. giving off via the weblog, weblog as a backstage), so if you are into those things I’d love to talk.

• Networked identity
• BlogHer aftermath: more on the speakers list
• Location-aware future

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Blog networking study: participants and their networks
• Artefacts of a weblog-mediated relationship: a visualisation
• Blog changing way we meet people

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.

***

Weblogs provide an opportunity to get to know their authors “from a distance” (Martin), 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 the relation” (Nancy) and to allow others “to build up an opinion without knowing you” (Luis).

In this process a weblog provides a representation of a blogger through their writing. It not only gives others an impression of “who you are and what you do”, but also allows to “get an introduction of your community” by seeing who comments (Luis).

Shawn 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.

Bloggers point that although weblog is a form of publication, it works differently from publishing an article: “if you read somebody’s paper you get to know their ideas, if you read their weblog, you get to know them as a person” (Dave), “when you write a blogpost you are giving yourself out as a person” (Luis).

What exactly helps to get to know a blogger as a person? Several bloggers mention passionate writing and “personal things” that appear on a weblog (for example, when talking about Bill Ives both Luis and Shawn mention his passion for food and restaurant reviews next to his KM writings).

However, it is more than that. Euan suggests that there is also

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.

For Nancy 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, so “you don’t get to know crappy writers via their weblogs”. Martin tells about the type of weblog writing that helps him to get to know others as those that show “willingness to expose what you don’t know [...] willingness to learn… not yet finished thinking” or the opposite, “being brave and bold”, taking a radical position that invites criticism. Shawn says that “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 posts”.

Learning about other bloggers comes through an aggregation of various signals:

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.(Euan)

Euan gives an example of observing how bloggers engage in an interaction in weblog comments that gives signals about them similar to observing their behaviour in a face to face conversation.

Since the process of getting to know others “from a distance” involves reading and browsing that does not leave many traces, a blogger does not necessarily knows about it. Monica tells about an invitation to come as a keynote speaker that she though was a joke until she’s got a confirming phone call:

I didn’t know I was followed by them. If [people] leave comments, you have a clue, a footprint. It turns out that the guy who was reading my blog suggested that I would be a good person to talk as a keynote speaker.

Gabriela is aware of people using her weblog to find more about her. She gives an example of a 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 feel threatened.”

Shawn gives an example of meeting readers of his weblog at a conference:

…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 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…

Luis, who has similar experiences with meeting previously unknown readers of his weblog at events, finds it “fascinating”. He says “that person gets my attention full at that moment” because “they took the effort to read what I write”.

In sum, blogging provides a “living portrait” that not only shows ideas and interests of a blogger, but also helps to get to know her as a person, by observing writing, linking and interaction over time. Such observation is not necessarily reciprocal, so asymmetrical relations are something that bloggers have to deal with. While it may be one-sided, learning about other bloggers from a distance provides an opportunity to make informed choices about possible closer contact with them, knowledge of their interests and personalities, as well as enough starting points for an interaction.

• Stephanie is coming to NL
• BlogHer aftermath: more on the speakers list
• Paper: Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community?

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.

***

How bloggers find each other? Study participants find new bloggers by attracting them with their own writing, through their network and in places where they meet bloggers they already know.

One way to discover others is writing own weblog, which then serves as “a conversation starter”, “a big neon sign that invites others to come and comment” (Ton). With multiple instruments that weblogs provide it is easy to get notified about comments to one’s weblog or links from other blogs. Bloggers follow trackbacks or subscribe to notification about referrals to their pages (e.g. via Technorati or Google blogsearch). Nancy, who had a web-site people linked to before, credits this attention to incoming links that is part of blogging as the reason for “discovering” people in her network that she was not aware of.

Those who comment on one’s blog writing are not random people. Bloggers appreciate the attention to their own work and the effort taken to comment: “the people who link to you are interesting, because they found your ideas interesting, they comment” (Dave). Monica indicates that commenting on blogs was not the obvious way to grow one’s professional network when she started: “I didn’t realise that linking and giving credits to someone’s work would extend my professional network very quickly”.

Another way to find other bloggers is through following links from people already in one’s own network, who provide filtering and recommendation:

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 you are pointing to something. (Euan)

Finally, bloggers find other bloggers in places where they go to interact with those they already know. Although usually these are events that bloggers attend to meet each other in person, they could be online places as well: Ton gives an example of a German blogger whom he first “met” in a comments section of an American weblog.

Given that bloggers indicated that their blogging connections often extremely diverse I ask what exactly contributes to finding others across boundaries. Nancy suggests that it is the public nature of weblogs and their discoverability as a result of cross-linking. She adds that 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 both when writing and reading.

This crossing becomes easier as weblogs are person-centred – “a weblog is about me even if you think you write about a topic” (Martin). They also represent different interests of their authors (“most of the times I read them for KM, but find something else”, Gabriela) and readers may value the diversity of topics covered (“good bloggers are eclectics, they do different things, they surprise you [...] that is what keeps you going back”, Dave).

In addition, at first blogging is “connecting through content” (Nancy). When one follows a link to a new weblog, blogger’s words are visible, while the details about the author (such as age, gender, professional affiliations or place in various hierarchies) are not necessarily on the surface or made explicit at all. As a result, with blogging “you can’t live of your reputation, you live of what you say” (Dave).

In the process of discovering interesting others weblogs serve as attractors and filters. From one side presenting oneself to the world through writing a weblog attracts others who resonate with this writing and comment or link back. From other side, weblogs work as filters: links by bloggers one reads provides not only pointing to potentially interesting others, but also personal recommendation. Since weblogs are rather person-centred than strictly focused on a predefined topic, a blogger often writes about a variety of personally relevant issues, exposing readers to potentially new and unexpected topical areas and other bloggers within those.

While finding others may result in a direct interaction (e.g. continuing a conversation in a weblog comments), it is not always so. The following post describes how it is possible to get to know other bloggers from a distance, without any interaction.

• Trust in weblog conversations
• Levels of communication, relation building and weblogs
• Blogs are smokescreens as much as windows

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Meeting imaginary friend
• Blog networking, blogwalking and being a boundary subject
• BlogWalk Seattle: people

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.

• Weblog as a backstage: performance is counterproductive
• Open issues for research/thinking on communities
• Blogging for knowledge workers: personal networking

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.

• Blog networking study: choosing channels
• Nancy White
• Blog networking study: establishing and maintaining relations via blogging

Blogging research thoughts is addictive: instead of waiting forewer to get things published you can get feedback almost instantly. It was a bit scary to post on personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging last week, but the comments I’m getting are really helpful to move further with it.

Refining the dimensions will take a bit more time, but now a couple of things:

• Jack Vinson suggested to add a radar chart for the dimensions to support visual thinkers, so there is an updated version of the Excel template for you to play with.
• I tried to compare the profiles of bloggers who did it for their weblogs in a radar chart (below). Colored lines represent specific bloggers; thick black line is an average. It’s interesting to see a lot of variation along most of the dimensions, except initiative to start (starting on personal initiative) and blog uses (mainly work-related) – I’d suspect this would be pretty typical in “my corner of the blogosphere” :)

And, a collection of links to the profiles of other bloggers (will be adding here as soon as I find more): Scott Wilson, Wytze Koopal, Joel Yuvienco, Jack Vinson, Marting Dugage, Nancy White, Barbara Dieu, Beth Kanter, Breyten Ernsting, Wilfred Rubens, Tore Hoel, Monica Andre, Emma Duke-Williams, Hans Mestrum

There is an updated picture as well (it’s changing as I get input from more people):

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/20.html#a1856; comments are here.

• Nancy White on blog communities and more questions
• My PhD research in 12 slides
• RSS vs. browser for weblog reading

Back home. Some SHiFT impressions that will stay:

Very convincing optimism of Euan Semple regarding the power of bottom-up processes in business settings that eventually will change organisations as we know them. Although I feel like being on the same ship thinking about long-term effects, I can’t avoid thinking of practicalities on the way there – this is something that came back over conversations with many others around SHiFT.

• Lack of compatibility with current cultural norms –>
  • “old” culture that shapes participants, difficulties with risk- and responsibility-taking behaviours at personal level (see also: Mediated)
  • management resistance (especially middle-management)
• Need to change organisational structures and processes. Euan said that “quiet revolution” will eventually happen when current bottom-up processes reach tipping point – wonder if we will deal with “revolution” or “evolution” scenarios.
• Technology upscaling problem – you may start experimenting with wikis and blogs at “do it yourself” server without a budget and formal support, but if the whole thing works it would have to “professionalise” to scale up (probably meaning relying on paid software, involving IT department, getting helpdesk, etc.). My experiences are that once you go beyond early adopters to majority you can’t rely on “do it yourself” technology any more (happy to hear any specific arguments if you believe that I’m wrong :).
• Creating a space for “globally distributed near instant person to person communication” doesn’t always means totally thought-free self-organisation. What seems to hide behind the success stories is the role and specific approaches of people who initiate and support the change (position and reputation in an organisation, insider knowledge of organisational culture that allows choosing ways that are likely to work, experience in facilitating change and self-organisation, specific tricks to make things work, etc…).

Discussions with Beverly Trayner and Stephanie Booth about helping unprepared participants to get involved with a community technology

• Attitudes: not being used to decentralised, participant-driven ways of communication – need for someone in the beginning to “start filling the page”, not expecting everyone “jumping into it” immediately, but designing strategies of involvement
• Fear of making mistakes (especially strong in some cultures, e.g. in Portugal according to Beverly) as a barrier – making own mistakes to give an example (although the culture could be too strong that you as a facilitator may start fear to make mistakes yourself)
• Lack of technology skills – slow introduction, preferably with private sync support (ideally f2f, otherwise IM/Skype/phone)

Communicating concepts through comics by Kevin Cheng (slides and related reading) – thinking of all those little drawings in my presentations that people seem to like to much :)

Extended thinking on design:

• Peter Merholz (stop designing products)
• Luke Wroblewski (story and slides)

• design as an added value once things start to work (find that diagram of Donald Norman)
• abductive thinking
• growing co-dependencies between technology, people and business
• “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” by Hans Hofmann (here)

Blogging SWOT by Monica Andre and Margarida Cardoso – will be back on that soon.

Talking with Suw on choices and ethics of handling digital information (following her talk about ORG).

The image of earthquake coming from David Galipeau.

Talking about balance with Martin.

Side observations – feeling of discrimination by the Mac majority (can’t they just accept that there are people who pray other gods?), talks about consulting rates and too much sweet pastries I couldn’t resist :)

Overall:

• SHiFT guys did a great job putting it all together – for me that was a good mix of familiar topics and stretching beyond current boundaries
• SHiFT notes by Luke Wroblewski and by Suw (between other things)
• I should be back to Lisbon to walk around – hardly had any time

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/09/30.html#a1837; comments are here.

• Blog networking study: staying in touch
• Effects of Longhorn blogs
• Enabling management oversight in corporate blog space

There is something that bothers me for a couple of weeks… First, a bit of history…

One of the comments I recieved from Inna Kouper on weblog conversation paper was about my involvement in it, the fact that as a researcher I could influence the conversation if I knew I was going to study it. I realised that Inna was right and included a statement that when the conversation was unfolding I wasn’t going to study it.

Now I have to confess that it’s not 100% true – somewhere in the middle of the conversation Aldo suggested to do a study on weblog conversations and I brought that particular case as an example. Although we didn’t make a choice for the case at that moment, we made a decision to study weblog conversations. And there is even evidence in my own blog:

I guess this conversation (and especially it’s hidden part) is a good example of tensions between “thinking together” and “doing together” as well as tensions between private and shared. To give you a feeling of the hidden part: some of the invisible activities related to this conversation (hope nobody gets angry about the disclosure):

• [...]
• me talking about this whole story with a colleague from another university resulting in our decision to study if/how weblog conversations (do not) support actions

I don’t know if that decision influenced my participation in the conversation. Did it bring additional degree of reflection? For example, would I post this summary of hidden activities if not that talk with Aldo? Don’t know… Probably I would, since it was a logical way to continue my thinking on hidden agenda, but there is no way to know.

At that moment I didn’t think about this issue – I just continued to participate in the conversation regardless the fact that it could get back to me as a case. Now it’s different: I became more aware of “me as a blogger” and “me as a researcher”.

So, as a result two weeks back I was struggling with another choice. I saw an interesting conversation unfolding, I wanted to participate, but I also thought that it would be a great “another case” to add to our paper since we discussed some future work with Aldo. Those two seemed to contradict: as a blogger I wanted to participate, as a researcher I knew that a better choice would be to stay away, so I could claim more objectivity in a future analysis.

The only thing that saved me from writing at that moment was the fact that I was too busy to find time for writing :)

Now I probably should be happy with it, since it feels too late to contribute and I can safely study the conversation (although, I’m not 100% safe as the work we did with Stephanie was reffered to at several moments, so I managed to influence the conversation even without direct participation :)

The funny thing is that I’m not happy with it, because next to being a researcher, I’m a blogger. Deciding not to contribute because it makes easier to justify my research changes my usual behaviour and influences conversation anyway (Monica said once that once you are a member of the community silence is a participation).

Anyway, I’m in trouble. I combine researching blogs and blogging research. I study my own community and I write about it. It’s a strange case of action research, where not only reflections are shared and shape the future, but also meta-reflections (like this one :). I will have hard time to justify it anyway…

So, I guess instead of making hard choices I’d allow myself to be myself doing heavily participative research that influence everything I study. It feels more authentic than making certain choices because it’s easier to justify my findings at the end. I hope that I’m explicit enough about what I do as a researcher.

At the end I’m just one of the players in the community, so would be stupid to think that it goes in particular direction because of my influences. I’m just playing my role, which happens to be a researcher who blogs about research of own blogging community :)))

Related reading: Chapter 3 “Reflexivity and participation in Online Games” from Torill‘s dissertation.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/12/17.html#a1460; comments are here.

• Virtual methods seminar
• Levels of communication, relation building and weblogs
• Weblog research ethics (3)