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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Nardi, B. A. (2005). Beyond bandwidth: dimensions of connection in interpersonal communication. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 14(2), 91-130. doi:10.1007/s10606-004-8127-9 (public .pdf)

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

• Shawn Callahan
• Writing books for managers
• The best part…

Since it’s something people ask from me once in a while – a list of research papers on business/corporate/employee blogging (primarily those where actual uses of weblogs are studied), abstracts included.

• When known the company studied is in [] in front of the reference.
• For an overview of more practitioner-oriented publications check Lockwood & Dennis (2008) below.
• Most of the papers are free online, google the title if you don’t have an access to the scientific databases.

Suggestions of what is missing are welcome, I will try to update this list, but no promises.

***

[HP] Brzozowski, M. J. & Yardi, S. (2008). Revealing the long tail in office conversations. In CSCW 2008 Workshop on Enterprise 3.0.

Blogs, wikis, and forums can break down geographic distances, workgroup boundaries, and organizational hierarchy in an organization. While these tools significantly lower the barriers to producing content, employees may perceive there to be little incentive to invest their own time in providing this content for public consumption. We found that increasing visibility often motivated employees to participate and contribute content. Employees were motivated by the opportunity for attention, and the ways in which social media tools enabled or hindered this opportunity influenced the way it was used. In this paper, we describe the design and use of the internal social media platforms at Hewlett-Packard and examine the ways that employees used these tools. Specifically, we explore ways in which designing for increased visibility and providing opportunities for recognition improve the ways that social media platforms can be used in organizations.

Dwyer, P. (2007). Building Trust with Corporate Blogs. In Proceedings of International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’07).

The personal relationships that companies once had with customers degenerated into the cold automaticity of datagathering with the widespread adoption of management information systems. By restoring a human face to a company’s self-presentation, blogging has been heralded as a paradigm shift in the way companies interact with customers. This study tests a model relating the content of an author’s blog posts to readers’ responses. It suggests that companies can use blogging to complement customer relationship management processes to the extent their customers exhibit an organic desire to commune by combining provocative informational content with expressions of benevolent intent. Such consumers respond well to these overtures, showing evidence of increased subject-matter involvement, liking and trust. The study also proposes a way to measure diversity of thought in reader comments to guard against being unduly swayed by a vocal minority.

[Microsoft] Efimova, L. & Grudin, J. (2007). Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (p. 86). IEEE Computer Society. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2007.159

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.

[IBM] Huh, J., Jones, L., Erickson, T., Kellogg, W. A., Bellamy, R. K. E., & Thomas, J. C. (2007). BlogCentral: the role of internal blogs at work. In CHI ’07 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 2447-2452). San Jose, CA: ACM. doi:10.1145/1240866.1241022

This paper describes a preliminary investigation into an internal corporate blogging community called BlogCentral. We conducted semi-structured interviews with fourteen active bloggers to investigate the role of blogging and its effects on work processes. Our findings suggest that BlogCentral facilitates access to tacit knowledge and resources vetted by experts, and, most importantly, contributes to the emergence of collaboration across a broad range of communities within the enterprise.

[IBM] Jackson, A., Jates, J., & Orlikowski, W. (2007). Corporate Blogging: Building community through persistent digital talk. In Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (p. 80). IEEE Computer Society. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2007.155

Blogging has grown exponentially on the Internet; however, the role of blogs within the enterprise remains ambiguous. Why and how do individuals use internal corporate blogs? What results do both individuals and the corporation realize from internal blogs? Our exploratory study of a large global IT corporation’s internal blogging system analyzed usage statistics, interviews, and the results of an anonymous, Web-based survey. We found that benefits to users were social as well as informational, and that connecting with their community was an important value sought by all types of users. Heavy users of the system realized the greatest benefits, but they also constituted the core of an online community that provided important benefits to medium users as well.

[Microsoft] Kaiser, S., Müller-Seitz, G., Lopes, M. P., & Pina e Cunha, M. (2007). Weblog-technology as a trigger to elicit passion for knowledge. Organization, 14(3), 391-412. doi:10.1177/1350508407076151

The practice of Weblogging as a new social and technological phenomenon in society and business is gaining a growing number of supporters. In short, a Weblog is a website where individual thoughts are publicly displayed in the form of a diary. In this paper, we seek to illustrate the impact of Weblog technology on people’s passion for knowledge. We start from the assumption that successful knowledge management requires the engagement of people in knowledge-related practices. We introduce a famous agglomeration of Weblogs that deal with the development of a commercial software. Based on an exploratory study, we suggest that the specific features and character of this novel technology have an impact upon the passion for voluntary knowledge work, which is triggered by experiences of flow states, as well as extrinsic stimuli.

[Microsoft] Kelleher, T. & Miller, B. (2006). Organizational blogs and the human voice: Relational strategies and relational outcomes. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2).

This study develops and tests operational definitions of relational maintenance strategies appropriate to online public relations. An experiment was designed to test the new measures and to test hypotheses evaluating potential advantages of organizational blogs over traditional Web sites. Participants assigned to the blog condition perceived an organization’s “conversational human voice” to be greater than participants who were assigned to read traditional Web pages. Moreover, perceived relational strategies (conversational human voice, communicated relational commitment) were found to correlate significantly with relational outcomes (trust, satisfaction, control mutuality, commitment).

[IBM] Kolari, P., Finin, T., Lyons, K., Yesha, Y., Yesha, Y., Perelgut, S. et al. (2007). On the structure, properties and utility of internal corporate blogs. In Proceedings of International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’07).

Weblogs, or blogs are radically changing the face of communication within enterprises. While at the minimum blogs empower employees to publicly voice opinion and share expertise, collectively they improve collaboration and enable internal business intelligence. Though the power of blogs within organizations is well accepted, their properties, structure and utility has not yet been formally analyzed. In this paper, we study the use of blogs within a large corporation to reveal some of the interesting characteristics. We propose new techniques to model the reach and impact of posts using the corporate hierarchy. We discuss how such a technique can feed into tools that identify the reach of blog posts, and the emergence of trends and experts within an organization.

Lockwood, N. S. & Dennis, A. R. (2008). Exploring the corporate blogosphere: A taxonomy for research and practice. In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (p. 149). IEEE Computer Society. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2008.163

Corporate blogs have received a great deal of attention recently in the practitioner literature and are gaining interest in the research community, although little is known about the uses and impacts of these blogs. We develop a taxonomy to describe and compare corporate blogs, and then apply it to companies listed on the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, and S&P SmallCap 600 indices. Our findings revealed several main clusters of blogs that are currently being hosted by corporations as well as a few uncommon types of blogs that may represent emerging trends in corporate blogging practices. These findings also suggest that our taxonomy is indeed able to differentiate among different types of corporate blogs and will be a useful tool for future research.

Stocker, A. & Tochtermann, K. (2008). Investigating Weblogs in Small and Medium Enterprises: An Exploratory Case Study. In D. Flejter, S. Grzonkowski, T. Kaczmarek, M. Kowalkiewicz, T. Nagle, & J. Parkes (Eds.), BIS 2008 Workshops Proceedings (pp. 95-107).

Contrary to a Wiki where the opinion of the individual user disappears in favor of a more impartial ‘collective intelligence’, a weblog is author-centered, expressing the author’s subjective point of view. This particular property of weblogs played a fundamental role for the popularity weblogs gained for making implicit knowledge explicit in an unsolicited, self-organized way. However, empirical studies from academia exploring internal corporate weblogs remain scarce, especially when they focus on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) which make up the majority of all enterprises worldwide. To counteract this lack of research, we investigate an internal corporate weblog in an ICT SME from a knowledge management perspective. We derive both research questions and hypotheses to test within future studies. Furthermore, we consider already gained findings from corporate weblog research and investigate their immediate applicability in the context of SMEs.

[HP] Yardi, S., Golder, S., & Brzozowski, M. J. (2008). The pulse of the corporate blogosphere. In Conference Supplement of CSCW 2008.

Blogging at work has gained considerable interest in the knowledge management community. It is not clear, however, how much of work blogging is related to work versus social, or when work blogging takes place. In this poster, we present results from our examination of the temporal aspects of blogging within a large internal corporate blogging community. We compared our findings to similar analyses of employee email use and to college student Facebook use. We found that blog posting is temporally similar to email, while blog reading is more similar to Facebook messaging. Our results suggest that participation is both work-related and social, indicating a desire to connect to coworkers at multiple levels.

• Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging
• Blogs: individual + networking
• Business blog links

Just finished and submitted :)

Efimova, L. (2008). Blending blogging into an academic text. Paper submitted IN THE GAME: Ethnographic relationships, mediation and knowledge, workshop at Internet Research 9.0, Copenhagen, Denmark, 15-18 October 2008.

Abstract. For my research blogging has been a blessing and a curse. While it has turned into a set of research practices that brought rich results, it also resulted in a search for methodologically sound ways to justify those practices, put me into a struggle of being a researcher and a blogger at the same time, and challenged everything I knew about academic writing. As I work on the chapters of my PhD dissertation, blending blogging into an academic text to bringing together the blogger and the researcher in me, this paper provides an opportunity to reflect on this process. I start from introducing my research and the roles blogging played in it, and then discuss bringing my own weblog in the dissertation through autoethnography and confessional writing as well as the challenges of representing other bloggers in the text of it.

Looking forward to the workshop – the list of the workshop participants and their papers is intriguing…

• Affectionate writing reduces cholesterol
• Blog networking study: establishing and maintaining relations via blogging
• When I’m done

I has been struggling for a while to figure out how comes that ‘individualistic’ weblogs support community formation. Paul Hodkinson provides an elegant answer to my question in his chapter on LJ goths in Uses of blogs:

Wellman and Gulia have distinguished between superficial “weak ties,” which are confined to a narrow shared interest and take place within a single domain, and “strong ties,” which involve extensive familiarity and are played out in a variety of domains. Through enabling individual goths to read about and comment upon a variety of aspects of one another’s individual, everyday lives, rather than just those aspects directly related to the goth scene, online journals played an important part in the development of strong, intimate relationships between them, which nearly always extended to other forms of interpersonal communication, whether email, online chat, mobile phone, or, most importantly, face-to-face interaction. In turn, the development and/or reinforcement of such strong, multiplex ties between goths served to reinforce participants’ general sense of investment in and attachment to the goth scene as a community. (pp.191-192)

Other interesting things in the chapter: moving from group spaces to weblogs, descriptions of online/offline dynamic around goth events, blogs as a way to reinforce culture. It’s about goths, but lots of things apply to other blogging subcultures (KM blogging, for example :)

References:

Hodkinson, P. (2006). Subcultural Blogging? Online Journals and Group Involvement among UK Goths, in A.Bruns & J. Jacobs (Eds.), Uses of blogs, pp. 187-197. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Wellman, B. and M. Gulia (1999) `Virtual Communities as Communities: Net Surfers Don’t Ride Alone’, in M. Smith and P. Kollock (Eds.), Communities in Cyberspace, pp. 163—90. London: Routledge.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/16.html#a1955; comments are here.

• Weblog conversations revisited: speed of linking
• AOIR 5.0: Workshop on qualitative research
• Wiki as a data collection instrument

It took me a while to blog that Jan’s paper on blogging practices has been published:

Schmidt, Jan (2007): Blogging Practices: An analytical framework. In: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol. 12, Nr. 4. Available online: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/schmidt.html

Abstract. This article proposes a general model to analyze and compare different uses of the blog format. Based on ideas from sociological structuration theory, as well as on existing blog research, it argues that individual usage episodes are framed by three structural dimensions of rules, relations, and code, which in turn are constantly (re)produced in social action. As a result, “communities of blogging practices” emerge – that is, groups of people who share certain routines and expectations about the use of blogs as a tool for information, identity, and relationship management. This analytical framework can be the basisfor systematic comparative and longitudinal studies that will further understanding of similarities and differences in blogging practices.

I wrote on it before (Jan Schmidt on blogging practices, Blogging practices, episodes and uses), but rereading it now. A couple of sidenotes:

• happy that my initial comments were pretty inline with those of other reviewers and Jan splitted the original paper into two (survey results have moved into Blogging practices in the German-speaking blogosphere. Findings from the “Wie ich blogge?!”-survey)
• Jan uses “framework” and “model” interchangeably, something that is considered to be a sin by one of my professors. I guess I’ll call Jan’s creation a “framework” :)

Also, Jan points to other blogging articles in the same JCMC issue:

• Anonymity and Self-Disclosure on Weblogs – Hua Qian and Craig R. Scott
• Psychological and Social Influences on Blog Writing: An Online Survey of Blog Authors in Japan – Asako Miura and Kiyomi Yamashita
• Gender Differences in British Blogging – Sarah Pedersen and Caroline Macafee

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/08/23.html#a1937; comments are here.

• Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging
• Archaeology and ethnography in weblog research
• Weblog reader

[Inspired by an abrupt switch in reading, going from business blogging papers to blogging in academia chapters by Alex (Scholarly blogging: Moving towards the visible college, pp.117-126) and Jill (Blogging from inside the Ivory Tower, pp.127-138) in Uses of blogs.]

Just a very subjective observation (=may not be true :): the issues I’m interested in respect to employee blogging (e.g.) seem to be better covered in publications on blogging in academia rather than those on blogging in business settings. I wonder why…

Business blogging papers seem to be aiming at explaining where and why weblogs could be useful in a business context and how to make them work. They do not necessarily speak the language that managers would understand, but they seem to embrace an organisational perspective as a starting point when discussing weblogs.

Academic blogging publications are different – they seem to be written having in mind fellow academics as potential readers. They often describe blogging practices from personal (rather than organisational) perspective even while positioning them in a broader context of academic practices.

Given what I have observed so far I’d think that the tensions between a blogger and an organisation she works for are much harder in business (academics seem to enjoy relatively more degrees of freedom at work), yet the authors discussing blogging in academia are more likely to talk about those tensions. I wonder if it is exactly because those more ‘degrees of freedom’, tensions are more apparent to or more likely to be discussed in the papers aimed at academics…

Or it’s just my own filters :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/12/01.html#a1865; comments are here.

• Macromedia blogging
• Making sense of weblogs in the intranet (in Lucent)
• CFP: Organisational Blogs: Opportunities and Challenges

Song, D., Bruza, P. D., McArthur, R. M., & Mansfield, T. (2006). Enabling management oversight in corporate blog space. AAAI Spring 2006 Symposia on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs.

Abstract. When a modern corporation empower its staff to use blogs to communicate with colleagues, partners, suppliers and customers, the role of management in exercising oversight and guidance over g public speech of staff becomes dramatically challenged. This paper describes a computational solution to the interpretation of human-readable blog publishing polity documents into semi-automatic disconformance checking of corporate blog entries. The disconformance interpretation is regarded as an abductive reasoning, which is operationalized by information flow computations. Using a socio-cognitively motivated representation of shared knowledge, and applying an appropriate information flow inference mechanism from a normative perspective, a mechanism to automatically detect potentially non-confirming blog entries is detailed. Candidate non-confirming non-conforming blog entries are flagged for a human to make a judgment on whether they should be published. Experiments on data from a public corporate blog demonstrate an encouraging performance of the proposed methodology.

This is one of those in my big “to blog” list (more papers from AAAI 2006 Symposia on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs). I find this paper interesting for two reasons. First, the methods it uses could be interesting for our own work on topic detection in weblogs (see Anjo’s blog, e.g. here). This one I’ll leave to the specialists (in our team I’m more of a rough quality check: I look at the results of a new method and say if it makes sense given my subjective knowledge behind the dataset :)

The second is more for my own work: it’s an assumption behind the research that what employees of a company say in their weblogs should be controlled by the company (hence developing methods to do so). Although I agree with the authors that weblog posts that do not comply with corporate communication policies can pose significant risks, I’m not sure I would ever want to work for a company that would try to censor my weblog. It’s not the act of censoring that I’m against, but the idea that employees could not be trusted enough to judge.

This corresponds well with the recent post on Enterprise 2.0 Insecurities by Andrew McAfee (discussing the problem from another angle):

people already know how to behave appropriately, and they’re not going to be driven suddenly wild by the appearance of the new platforms

That said, I have to admit that the issue is not an easy one. In one of my drafts I talk about it in a section on business challenges that blogging brings:

Lack of control of company’s message to the external world. Each blogger turns into “self-appointed spokesperson”, communicating with the rest of the world based on own interpretations of corporate policies, interests and risks. This could turn into accidental leaks of confidential information, disrupt “official” public relations or marketing campaigns or create unexpected incidents when business-related information misinterpreted or amplified by media.

So, what might go wrong?

• Corporate policies (and other information necessary for a good judgment) are not necessarily explicit, easy to interpret or communicated well to employees. Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to think of any possible situation and describe it in policies at right level of detail.
• Corporate policies and/or bloggers themselves do not take into account specific characteristics of blogging that make it different from other forms of communication (e.g. speed, visibility, persistence) that could make a weblog post on a topic potentially more “risky”.
• Sometimes “bad effects” of a weblog post couldn’t be predicted in advance.
• Bloggers do make mistakes.

What could be done?

• Making sure that those rules that exist are clear and communicated to bloggers.
• Reflect on potential risks (especially those specific to weblogs) and raise awareness about them. Make sure that stories of bloggers about undesired effects of their own blog posts are heard by others. Do not police, but help people to learn making better judgment.
• If you really want to employ preventive text analysis try to turn it into an educating experience. E.g. instead of sending “suspicious post” to a manager for an approval, return it to the blogger with something like “there is a chance that you might be violating company policy regarding information about our stocks – are you sure you want to post it?”. People do use spell-checkers to avoid stupid mistakes, so if positioned properly this might work.
• Think of potential benefits and relax. As said in Russia, those who do not take risks do not get a chance to drink champagne :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/30.html#a1864; comments are here.

• B-blogs
• BlogWalk 4.0
• Facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments

A special issue of Theories/Practices of Blogging edited by Michael Benton and Lauren Elkin is out. Looking forward to reading!

• Michael Benton, “Thoughts on Blogging by a Poorly Masked Academic”
• Craig Saper, “Blogademia”
• danah boyd, “A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium”
• Tama Leaver, “Blogging Everyday Life”
• Erica Johnson, “Democracy Defended: Polibloggers and the Political Press in America”
• Carmel L. Vaisman, “Design and Play: Weblog Genres of Adolescent Girls in Israel”
• David Sasaki, “Identity and Credibility in the Global Blogosphere”
• Anna Notaro, “The Lo(n)g Revolution: The Blogosphere as an Alternative Public Sphere?”
• Esther Herman, “My Life in the Panopticon: Blogging From Iran”
• Various Authors, “Webfestschrift for Wealth Bondage/The Happy Tutor” [external link]
• Lilia Efimova, “Two papers, me in between” [external link]
• Lauren Elkin, “Blogging and (Expatriate) Identity”
• Various Bloggers, “Why I Blog: Part 1” and “Part 2”

I loved the Blogroll section of the issue with the annotated collection of links to “Why I blog” posts by various bloggers – not only the idea of it (blurring the boundaries of blogging culture as the object of investigation and part of the reality being lived), but also the complexity of what comes from reading the selection. If someone would ask me an advice right now about a study of blogger motivations with something like a survey, I’d point to the collection with a challenge to come up with a set of questions that would describe the variety of it [fighting my own PhD demons here :)]…

I also have mixed feelings about my own contribution to it. From one side, I’m happy that my essay and one of the posts became the part of it. From another, it feels like I could do more – getting together all drafts and bits I wrote on my own blogging research experiences into a proper essay. Over last two years I was starting to work on it on three different occasions (including two attempts for Reconstruction), but somehow wasn’t able to get it into something finished for an external reader. May be its time hasn’t come yet and I need more time to shape what I want to say there…

And I’m really grateful to one of the editors of the issue, Michael Benton. Not only he introduced me to autoethnography (pretty much as I describe in Two papers), he kept encouraging me through the process of working on things I has been too scared to touch…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/24.html#a1860; comments are here.

• The ‘and’ way and the ‘but’ way
• OKLC04: useful links for KM PhDs
• Cynical perspective on defining weblog communities

Just to let you know that paper on the Microsoft study is online:

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.

Between other things it provides some context for personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging. But don’t expect everything to be clear in that respect – I’m currently reworking presentation and analysis to make things more explicit.

On a side note: I wonder how many ways of telling and retelling the story I’ll go through before ending up with something for the dissertation. It feels like a big messy forest and with each talk or paper version I’m exploring new ways to lead others through it. Somehow finding ‘the main path’ consists of making all kinds of little tours for all kinds of audiences…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/23.html#a1859; comments are here.

• Post dissertation stress disorder
• Weblog as knowledge networker instrument: questions
• PhD defense

Anjo Anjewierden and Lilia Efimova. Understanding weblog communities through digital traces: a framework, a tool and an example. In Proceedings International Workshop on Community Informatics (COMINF 2006), pp. 279-289, Montpellier, 2006 (November). Springer, LNCS 4277.

Abstract. Often research on online communities could be compared to archaeology (Jones, 1997): researchers look at patterns in digital traces that members leave to characterise the community they belong to. Relatively easy access to those traces and a growing number of methods and tools to collect and analyse them make such analysis increasingly attractive. However, a researcher is faced with difficult tasks of choosing which digital artefacts and which relations between them should be taken into account, and how the finding should be interpreted to say something meaningful about the community based on the traces of its members.

In this paper we present a framework that allows categorising digital traces of an online community along five dimensions (people, documents, terms, links and time) and then describe a tool that supports the analysis of community traces by combining several of them, illustrating the types of analysis possible using a dataset from a weblog community.

I should blog it a while ago :)

Anyway, the paper is good to get an idea of what we (Anjo, me, Rogier Brussee and Robert de Hoog) have been doing behind the scenes in respect to understanding and visualising patterns in weblog communities.

For more:

• Anjo’s posts on the workshop and the framework (and lots of other things in the archives)
• my post on artefacts and practices in weblog research
• “research challenges” section in unpublished paper with Stephanie (published version lost some of the discussion relevant to this post)

Hmm, given how many bits and pieces are already there I should write more on it…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/08.html#a1852; comments are here.

• Virtual methods seminar
• OKLC04: my presentation
• Blogging and my PhD research