Mathemagenic

While I didn’t blogged, I read weblogs. Big share of those are on parenting-related themes. One of the trends that I was surprised to see is how many of those are into “pro-blogging” - blogging not only for the fun of it, but also for some business-related purposes (some links are here).

This seems to the case for “weblogs in general” too - I come across more and more advice on pro-blogging. Reading it I realise how much what I do with my weblog is guided by other choices and principles: I prefer not to define goals and strategies for blogging and while I’m glad to have readers, I do not spend much time putting on paper who is my audience and how exactly my weblog will make it happy.

And, on the top of it, I get annoyed when blogging is conceptualised primarily as a medium for public communication (especially with microphones or megaphones as a visual metaphor ;). So, working on a PhD chapter that describes my own blogging practices, I wanted to show the other side of it - blogging for myself. Below is a slightly edited piece from the current draft.

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Blogging is frequently viewed as a medium for public communication: it is reasonable to assume that those who do not want their words to be read by a broad audience would use another medium. However, while the need to communicate is a part of blogging, it is not necessary the primarily reason for it.

In my case blogging grew out of a need for a place to organise my thinking and exploration; the readers, as well as writing for them, appeared later. While the public nature of blogging was the factor I took into account from the beginning of it, the primary force that shaped it was its usefulness for myself.

In the process of balancing my own needs and interests with those of my potential readers when blogging I often make choices to serve my own interests first. Those choices shaped my blogging practices in multiple ways.

Work-in-progress instead of polished pieces. Although a weblog readers are more likely to benefit from well-thought and carefully crafted posts, my need for capturing ideas at their early stages resulted in writing quick work-in-progress memos. Using weblog for a quick documentation, often squeezed between working on other task also resulted in writing many relatively short posts, connected by links. While it provides a trail of connected ideas that works for my own purposes, it is more difficult to follow and to make sense of for a reader, who could probably benefit more from reading a longer entry that would connect several linked posts into a coherent whole.

Fragmented weblog focus. When started, my weblog was focused primarily on the topics related to learning and knowledge management. Over time my writing shifted to other topics, potentially alienating loyal readers. While I was “not sure that reading all methodology ‘thinking aloud’ is that fun” (quoted from this post) it was essential for my learning process, so it became relatively big part of the weblog content. Currently, the content of my weblog is pretty fragmented as it reflects the change of my interests and topics I worked on over time.

“Selfish” tagging. Another dimension where the choices between my own interests and those of an external audience appeared was using tags for organising my own posts. While I had multiple opportunities to use tags that would help users of external systems to find relevant entries in my weblog, I haven’t used them since this would mean losing personally meaningful tag-based navigation in my weblog. The choice of terms to use as tags is also influenced primarily by their relevance for my own thinking practice.

The reasons for choosing to serve my own needs before those of my audience are twofold:

• Serving the needs of others might make blogging meaningless for myself. For example, writing only on a narrow set of topics in the weblog defeats the initial purpose of blogging to collect in one place fragmented bits relevant to my thinking.
• In my case too much dependence on the audience is proved to be paralysing: I would spend too much time trying to figure out for whom exactly to write and what their needs might be (a bit more on writing for non-existing audience). Also, non-intrusive nature of blogging (e.g. compared to the email that is delivered to the mailboxes) means that there is no necessarily an audience for a specific post, so writing to serve others in this case feels similar to giving a presentation in an empty room.

***

Other bloggers on related issues:

• Don’t Tell Me How To Blog
• Your Blog Archives: To Cull or Not to Cull?
• The luxury of pupose-less blogging can be a good thing

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I did an internal talk today, trying to put in a coherent story some results from two studies and emergent ideas about conclusions for my dissertation. I’m not extremely happy with what came out of it, but in case someone wants it - it’s at Slideshare.

Some comments on the stuff covered:

• Study 1 is an analysis of my own blogging practices as related to the development of ideas for the PhD dissertation. It’s an autoethnography that uses my weblog as an input to reconstruct my uses of weblog as a personal knowledge base and as a tool to support process of idea development from early stages to final products. Lots of unsorted background reading is in PhD/Chapter 3 category.
• Study 2 is an analysis of 6320 posts of 34 KM blogs in 2004. The visuals don’t make that much sense without an explanation, which is too complicated to write here. Some background is at:
  • Weblog conversations revisited: an introduction
  • Weblog conversations revisited: is there more than one?
  • Weblog conversations revisited: conversations with self
  • Weblog conversations revisited: conversations with self vs. conversations with others
  • Weblog conversations: the big one
• The last part is an attempt to use ideas from the research about the conditions for emergent social processes in cities (background reading) to explain how satisfying personal interests results in social effects in the case of weblogs and other tools.

Both studies also exist as PhD chapter drafts that I can share with those really interested; final part will appear in some form in the conclusions of my dissertation, due end of the summer.

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Reading a talk by danah boyd on Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace. Besides fascinating insights into online youth culture that danah brings so well, I find something that connects well with my own work - a piece on public, private and controlled spaces for adults and teens:

In this context, there are three important classes of space: public, private and controlled. For adults, the home is the private sphere where they relax amidst family and close friends. The public sphere is the world amongst strangers and people of all statuses where one must put forward one’s best face. For most adults, work is a controlled space where bosses dictate the norms and acceptable behavior.

Teenager’s space segmentation is slightly different. Most of their space is controlled space. Adults with authority control the home, the school, and most activity spaces. Teens are told where to be, what to do and how to do it. Because teens feel a lack of control at home, many don’t see it as their private space.

To them, private space is youth space and it is primarily found in the interstices of controlled space. These are the places where youth gather to hang out amongst friends and make public or controlled spaces their own. Bedrooms with closed doors, for example.

Adult public spaces are typically controlled spaces for teens. Their public space is where peers gather en masse; this is where presentation of self really matters. It may be viewable to adults, but it is really peers that matter.

Reading this helped my framing my research interests in yet another way - I’m interested in uses of technology on the intersection between private, public and controlled spaces in a case of knowledge workers.

However, before getting further with the distinction I have to figure out from there it comes. Any references to other work?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/06/20.html#a1782; comments are here.

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What would you do when using quotes or stories from public weblogs as examples in your research?

Do you inform people that you study them? I can understand it if you study specific weblogs to use them as a case, but what if you just let yourself to be immersed in the blogging community and pick up stories and examples as they come and go. You can announce your interest in studying it in on-line chat or forum, but what do you do with weblogs, with their open-ended nature. Do you post “I’m studying your blog” on all your pages?

Do you quote anonymously or with attribution? You can tell stories without giving any names, but quotes are never anonymous - Google is always there for those who are interested to find the author. Attribution is nice for the authors if you quote their smart ideas, but what if you want to illustrate conflict?

Do you ask for permission? I don’t ask people for permission to quote their paper in my research and I don’t ask for a permission of bloggers to quote their posts in my weblog. How weblogs are different? They out their in public, so I should be able to quote as far as it’s “fair use” (but what is fair use when it comes to blogging?). From another side, they are between public and private, so should you excuse yourself as you would do interfering a conversation overheard in a party?

I would appreciate any thoughts on it, especially if you are researching weblogs and have your own guidelines for making ethical decisions.

And, once you are reading this post you are somehow on my radar - beware, I may be studying your weblog :)

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/27.html#a1188; comments are here.

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Just thought I would share a piece from the previous post paper (p.9):

In a simplest case, a weblog post is embedded into “a conversation with self”, a personal narrative used to articulate and to organise his own thinking. A single blogger could have several of such conversations simultaneously, returning to ideas over time. In a weblog this is usually visible as linking to one’s earlier posts, use of related titles, or organising ideas using different categories or topics. At the same time a weblog post can trigger (or be a response to) a conversation with others, sometimes leading to several independent conversations happen simultaneously.

The interplay between personal and public, individual and community, is something that makes weblogs interesting to study… In the same line of thinking (Learning webs, p.4):

Synergies of self-organised and community learning. A weblog provides its author with personal space for learning that does not impose a communal learning agenda and learning style. At the same time learners are not alienated and can benefit from a community feedback, validation and further development of ideas.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/03/22.html#a1137; comments are here.

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Yesterday, taking a break from writing I was reading a paper about effects of visualising e-mail archives, Digital artifacts for remembering and storytelling: PostHistory and Social Network Fragments by Fernanda Viégas, danah boyd, David H. Nguyen, Jeffrey Potter, Judith Donath (try this or this if you don’t have IEEE access).

As part of a long-term investigation into visualizing email, we have created two visualizations of email archives. One highlights social networks while the other depicts the temporal rhythms of interactions with individuals. While interviewing users of these systems, it became clear that the applications triggered recall of many personal events. One of the most striking and not entirely expected outcomes was that the visualizations motivated retelling stories from the users’ pasts to others. In this paper, we discuss the motivation and design of these projects and analyze their use as catalysts for personal narrative and recall.

Things to remember:

Example of SNA on e-mail data aimed to support individual and not corporate decision-makers. This makes me thinking about the potential “market” for tools aggregating and visualising data: may be they are more likely to be used by individuals to make sense of their own data, then by “someone” who wants to get a picture of what’s going on in a company (example: my struggle to choose between liveTopics and k-collector). People are selfish: I care more about my own archives than about my company’s :)

Inside the article there are some strong quotes on our dependence on external objects to think and to remember. I should expand on it one day, this is something that connects information and knowledge and explains why personal information management skills are important for a knowledge worker.

How much could be extracted only from e-mail headers, without any content analysis.

User reactions on interacting with systems visualising their e-mail archives:

• recalling stories associated with patterns in e-mail change and being eager to share them with others (”Given the opportunity to gain meaningfull access to date about oneself, people want to explore it and then share it with others” p.9)
• discoveries about oneself: e-mail use patterns, forgotten friends, connections between people, reflecting on relations

The most interesting finding in the paper is the fact that the users feel that visualisations themselves do not reveal stories behind them:

Some of the ways in which our users interacted with the visualizations are reminiscent of how people relate to photographs. People return to their photos to reflect on past experiences as well as to share aspects of their lives with others. Photographs themselves convey limited slices of the events they represent, but their presence allows the owner to convey as much or as little as they want in sharing the event represented. Although our stories are as deeply embedded in our email as they are in our photos, we rarely have access to any sort of “snapshot” of our email so as to have these deep reflections and storytelling opportunities. The higher-level view of our digital experiences is buried deep within the actual data. When users in our case studies began storytelling around the visualizations, we realized that these provided a missing link; they created a legible and accessible view for sharing and reflecting upon our digital experiences, without revealing too much. (p. 8)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/03/01.html#a1104; comments are here.

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Why Ask Questions in Public? (via David Carter-Tod)

So please, unless you have a question that only I can answer for some reason, ask it in public on a newsgroup or mailing list. I’m more likely to be in a question-answering mood when I encounter your question, you’re giving more people the chance to help you, you’re helping all the people who come after you that have the same question, and you won’t be contributing to the problem that many of us have in keeping up with our private e-mail. You’re even likely to get a better answer, and could spark a discussion of your problem that would give far more information than you would have gotten out of any one individual.

Read the whole article for the arguments of choosing to discuss things in public rather than in private. It comes just in time for my thinking on a paper abstract :)

People prefer personal spaces: it feels more comfortable, fast and easy to ask personally, to have documents on your local drive or to search your inbox for copies of corporate reports…

Think of e-mail. E-mail is where knowledge goes to die (Bill French): most of e-mails I have in my mailbox could be shared without any problem within my company, but nobody could see them and to learn from them. For example, within a company one of the targets for introducing on-line communities usually is about moving one-to-one conversations to a space where more people could learn from them.

In a corporate context most people are not eager to use public spaces (for example, they continue storing documents locally instead of using document management system). I keep on wondering why.

I think that in most cases people don’t mind sharing, but they also need their own, not a “corporate” or “community”, way to do it. So in most of cases they choose to do things in private spaces in their own way rather putting effort “to confirm” to standards of public spaces.

Now think about the power of weblogs for thinking in public or bookmarking with del.icio.us. I guess their sucess is in supportting personal ways of doing things in public.

See also: public - private - secret, professional/personal or public/private balance and your conversation might be public domain

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/22.html#a951; comments are here.

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I’m using del.icio.us for a few weeks now, but there are some changes in my bookmarking habits already:

• I add post to del.icio.us bookmarklet to all computers I use (including adding and then deleting it at Internet cafes!)
• I stopped sending e-mails to myself with links!!!
• I have less “just a link” weblog posts.
• I do not keep many things in my news aggregator just to decide what should I read them, send e-mail to myself or write “just a link” weblog post :)

I definitely like an opportunity to assign tags that emerging with my thinking. For me it works the same way for accessing my bookmarks as liveTopics for accessing my weblog, but with one important difference: it allows both my own and a community views on bookmarks and tags describing them. This is something that could be done by combining functionalities of liveTopics and k-collector in a way that allows switching between personal and community views on weblog content.

I do not know if del.icio.us will scale in time for me. Also I would love to have a better integration of it with my weblog. I’m thinking of using Radio’s multiAuthorWeblogTool to get links posted to my weblog automatically via my del.icio.us RSS feed. This will make them searchable with the rest of my weblog, but still leaves the problem of integrating two sets of topics (liveTopics for weblog posts and del.icio.us tags for bookmarks).

I still hope to find time to write on linkblogs, so this reflection may be a first step…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/17.html#a901; comments are here.

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I’m back from KM Europe. That was a strange conference. If I think along content vs. networking scale it was much about networking. Or networking and peer-generated content. I’m sure I’ve learnt more from talks around coffee, food and walking in Amsterdam than from the formal program.

I will try to post specific notes about some sessions, but so far general insights.

Building bridges. I had a lot of fun of getting people from my blogging network and from my Knowledge Board/KM Summer School 2003 network talking to each other. Hope they had fun as well.

Main lines that emerged in my head from visiting presentations and talking with people:

• exposure to differences and “mind stretching” are very important for learning and innovation and related issue of apprenticeship models vs. exposure to differences
• KM is much about interplay between public and private spaces and related question about what happens once private becomes visible
• how do you find what you need to know (or - the cost of not knowing)

I wonder if it is an objective confirmation for my own beliefs (e.g. that learning comes from recognising differences) or I just filtered out things that are aligned with my own thinking and research :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/15.html#a833; comments are here.

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