This is a piece from the current version of final chapter of my dissertation where I discuss blogging across various boundaries.  It draws heavily on the conceptual categories from the work of Etienne Wenger on communities of practice (Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity, 1998) and on the discussion with CPsquare members about those.

***

While blogging might provide a window onto practices of the blogger, on a surface weblog is just an artefact: text, links and bits of other media. In this post I reflect on the ways blogging helps to cross boundaries through information exchange and non-personal connections, using the concept of boundary object as a starting point. This concept was introduced by Susan Leigh Star (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star, 1989), who used it to describe how practices of different social worlds are coordinated:

Boundary objects are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds. (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 393)

My original interest in using the concept of boundary objects in respect to blogging comes from the term itself (weblog is an object that works across various boundaries), so my treatment of it deviates from the way it is usually used. I use it to refer to an object at a boundary of different perspectives that include those of an individual, rather than to an object at an intersection between social worlds (Star & Griesemer, 1989) or communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). In addition, boundary objects are defined through their use for coordinating different perspectives (for example, this point is emphasised by Wenger, 1998, pp. 107-108), while in the case of blogging coordination between perspectives is often an accidental side-effect, rather than intentional.

Those differences might warrant the need to introduce an alternative terminology, however I leave it for further work and focus on parallels between boundary objects and weblogs: artefacts-based connections between different perspectives that do not require personal engagement and characteristics that enable those connections.

Contrasting the role of boundary objects in crossing boundaries between communities of practice with brokering, Wenger emphasises that artefact-based connections “can transcend the spatiotemporal limitations inherent in participation” (Wenger, p. 110), since artefacts can travel easier than people, however, uprooted from specific practices, artefacts are also a source of ambiguity and misinterpretation. Studies, presented in my dissertation show that weblogs have a potential to connect different perspectives without requiring personal engagement. For example, readers of my weblog pick up bits of the research relevant for them; KM bloggers use weblogs to establish information relations next to those of more personal nature. The Microsoft case provides a view on how far information can travel via weblogs, as well as an idea of challenges of misinterpretation it can bring.

Based on the different types of boundary objects described by Star (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star, 1989), Wenger proposes a number of characteristics “enabling artefacts to act as boundary objects” (Wenger, 2001, 107):

1) Modularity: each perspective can attend to one specific portion of the boundary object (e.g., a newspaper is a heterogeneous collection of articles that has something for each reader).

2) Abstraction: all perspectives are served at once by deletion of features that are specific for each perspective (e.g., a map abstracts from the terrain only certain features, such as distance and elevation).

3) Accommodation: the boundary object lends itself to various activities (e.g., the office building can accommodate the various practices of its tenants, its caretakers, its owners, and so forth).

4) Standardization: the information contained in a boundary object is in a prespecified form so that each constituency knows how to deal with it locally (for example, a questionnaire that specified how to provide some information by answering certain questions).

Those characteristics are useful to view what enables weblogs to serve as connectors across various perspectives.

Modularity and standardisation are inherent to weblogs: blogging is about bits of microcontent (weblog posts), connected within and across weblogs by standardised structure and protocols. When finding a new weblog, those familiar with the medium, know how to deal with it (e.g. distinguish specific posts and their metadata, browse through the archives or subscribe to the updates). Specific weblog posts, accompanied by permalinks, can be accessed without the rest of the weblog. This allows information presented in a weblog to travel far outside of the original contexts where it was created.

The potential of a weblog to accommodate various activities is not immediately obvious: on a surface it is an instrument for low-threshold publishing that allows reaching broad audiences without pushing information to them. However, the results of the studies presented in my dissertation suggest that it may also support conversations with self and interactions with specific others (more on publishing vs. interaction, conversations with self and conversations with others).

A combination of those three modes supports accommodation for various practices of different constituencies. An individual blogger might use weblog for a conversation with self - articulating thoughts and feelings, organising own digital bits or reflecting on the traces left over time in retrospect. Publishing makes one’s weblog traces exposed, so others can learn from them without necessarily engaging directly with the blogger. On the other hand, weblogs could be also used for interaction and engaging in-depth, allowing to build relations and trust and to develop ideas in dialogue with one’s contacts.

Finally, since multiple perspectives are served at once, weblogs also exhibit a degree of abstraction, for example, when specific details of one’s work or personal situation is omitted to make possible sharing the essence in public and knowing that the author himself or those “who know” can read between the lines to reconstruct missing details. Abstraction also makes information presented in a weblog accessible and relevant to broader and varied audiences, while also increasing a chance for misinterpretation.

In sum, while not necessarily fully fitting in a definition of a boundary objects, weblogs exhibit characteristics that make them effective in establishing artefact-based connections across boundaries of different social world.

• Theories/Practices of Blogging in Reconstruction (Vol. 6, No. 4, 2006)
• Weblog networking: two way awareness and different degrees of strength
• Cynical perspective on defining weblog communities

This is a piece from the current version of final chapter of my dissertation where I discuss blogging across various boundaries.  It draws heavily on the conceptual categories from the work of Etienne Wenger on communities of practice (Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity, 1998) and on the discussion with CPsquare members about those.

***

While to an extend weblogs do represent bloggers behind them and are often perceived as their online identities, studies presented in my dissertation also indicate that blogging involves many challenges of dealing with different audiences that a weblog serves (the results of blog networking study provide examples of both). Blogging in a context of knowledge work requires balancing interests of self and others, peers and customers, close friends and occasional lurkers, or those of people coming from different disciplinary backgrounds. From this perspective I find useful the discussion of identity in relation to participation in different communities of practice by Etienne Wenger (1998, p.159):

Our various forms of participation delineate pieces of a puzzle we put together rather than sharp boundaries between disconnected parts of ourselves. An identity is thus more than just a single trajectory; instead, it should be viewed as a nexus of multimemberhsip. As such a nexus, identity is not a unity but neither is it simply fragmented.

• On the one hand, we engage in different practices in each of the communities of practice to which we belong. We often behave rather differently in each of them, construct different aspects of ourselves, and gain different perspectives.
• On the other hand, considering a person as having multiple identities would miss all the subtle ways in which our various forms of participation, no matter how distinct, can interact, influence each other, and require coordination.

The notion of nexus adds multiplicity to the notion of trajectory. A nexus does not merge the specific trajectories we form in out various communities of practice into one; but neither does it decompose our identity into distinct trajectories in each community. In a nexus, multiple trajectories become part of each other, whether they clash or reinforce each other. They are, at the same time, one and multiple.

When one belongs to different social worlds, being a one person requires what Wenger discusses as reconciliation, the process of constructing an identity that can integrate “different meanings and forms of participation into one nexus” (p.160).

Although usually participation in different social worlds is somewhat separated in time and space (e.g. being a colleague at work and a parent at home, while still maintaining a single identity of a working parent), blogging brings it into a single space and sometimes even into a single moment, when a blogpost is written to capture one’s experiences between those worlds (for example). In this case different forms of participation collapse creating a living resolution of a boundary. In addition, the work of reconciliation, usually very personal and invisible (p.161), leaves publicly visible traces when bloggers use their weblogs in different contexts.

Wenger discusses participative connection across community boundaries as brokering, which is defined as “use of multimembership to transfer some elements of one practice into another” (p.109):

The job of brokering is complex. It involves processes of translation, coordination, and alignment between perspectives. It requires enough legitimacy to influence the development of a practice, mobilize attention, and address conflicting interests. It also requires the ability to link practices by facilitating transactions between them, and to cause learning by introducing into a practice elements of another. Toward this end brokering is provides a participative connection - not because reification is not involved, but because what brokers press into service to connect practices is their experience of multimembership and the possibilities for negotiation inherent in practice.

While brokering is not necessarily an intentional activity of a blogger, the co-existence and reconciliation of different perspectives in a singe weblog might results in accidental brokering. In this case elements of practices are transferred across boundaries as bloggers address conflicting interests and translate between different perspectives through their writing – not because they planned to do so but since this is what being able to write in a single weblog requires – providing their readers with an opportunity to “visit” practices different from their own.

In this case weblog provides a window onto practice, supporting learning trough legitimate peripheral participation as it allows “to look through it onto as much actual practice as it can reveal, to see to increasingly greater depths, and to collaborate in exploration” (Brown&Duguid, 1992, for more see Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks). Access to practices of others in this way requires time and effort of picking up contextual cues “between the lines” and establishing relations needed for joint exploration. However, weblogs also provide an alternative way to peek into other worlds that does not necessarily requires the effort of engaging in person, but rather allows connecting through artefacts.

• More on reading weblogs
• PhD dissertation on implementing blogs in manufacturing environment
• Learning: teams vs. communities

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Blog networking study: participants and their networks
• CPsquare open house
• Cross-cultural reading

• No related posts.

Just posted this as a suggestion for Reboot, but thought it could be relevant for any event:

Last year it was sad to see so many plastic water bottles floating around the building and then going to the trash. I think it would be nice to use reusable water bottles next year and a few watercoolers for refilling them. It could be anything between providing normal plastic bottles and encouraging people to refill them or getting really cool sporty water bottles with Reboot/sponsors on them as a giveaway (personally, I’m a big fan of SIGG bottles, but it could be anything nice to carry).

I guess they should have some way to attach to bags (a carabiner? another good thing to use for sponsors) and a way to personalise, so people are not lost between too many identical bottles (nametags? permanent markers for making own design?). A bottle carrier is another option, could work with normal plastic bottles (something like this one).

So, at the end we all could feel a bit better by being a bit more green.

I changed into reusing plastic bottles after I’ve got BuiltNY neoprene bottle case that snaps to my backpack. I did reuse plastic bottles before, but would usually forget to bring one along for day trips and had to buy a new one. It was also a bit scary to put inside the backpack with all the gear and papers. Now I have one that hangs outside - not so scary and easier to access (I also drink more water now :). Never thought it was something special until Patricia Arnold liked the solution and asked me about it.

The only problem with the case is that it hides the bottle. After envying Alexander’s SIGG bottle for a while I asked one for myself as a present - and the one I’ve got now looks too nice to hide :)

• ‘In Web 1.0 no-one had any children’
• Reboot 9.0: conversation about work, us and our kids?
• Reboot 9: experiences of going to a conference with your baby

In my dissertation I describe uses of weblogs as a sense-making instrument that provides a way to deal with unexpected or complex ideas by supporting articulation and organising ideas at a personal level combined with distributed collaborative thinking in “sense-making networks“. While exploring this theme as part of the content of my research was somewhat expected, I did not realise how much reflecting on practices of others and my blogging experiences in that respect would challenge my research methodology-wise.

Blogging research not only turned into participatory research and involving others as co-researchers. As I experienced the flexibility of organising my thinking with the weblog, as well as the fun and added value of the social nature of it, it became more and more difficult to use conventional data analysis methods and tools.

As it’s easy to attribute to my own personality or strange choices, I was glad to hear that I’m not alone in it. Stuart French on blogs as study tool (once you are there check University 2.0 too):

The real research is happening in NVivo, but I find that I do a lot of my thinking better in a blog than a analytic memo, so I started interchanging the two. If a memo was about a specific data or participant then in went into NVivo and was linked, but the more general thoughts about underlying cause/efect relationships, theories in the literature and in use by the participants to make sense of their environments…they end up in the blog.

More and more though, I find the challenge of writing for public consumption adds something of an edge to the process of analysis so many of the recent posts have been to this blog rather than my private one.

In my own case blogging came before I made a choice for specific data analysis methods or considered using tools for qualitative data analysis. When I tried some of them, I missed two things in comparison to blogging: flexibility of dealing with fuzzy data and emergent assumptions, and an easy way to involve of others in the process . While on the technology side including those capabilities in the research tools is probably just a matter of time, I believe that addressing them methodology-wise provides a bigger challenge.

My experiences of sense-making as a flexible, intuitive and messy process raise questions about finding a methodologically sound way to accommodate for those:

If expertise is difficult to articulate, how would you specify (for example) explicit coding criteria to pinpoint patterns? How far the need to make things explicit, to categorise beforehand would ruin the richness of what could be found? How far the decisions on what are the patterns could be logically explained? How easily the process itself could be articulated for an examination by others?

The social nature of sense-making with blogging indicates other challenges. While action research methodologies do provide a way to include others in research, the ways of doing so rely on having a shared goal and cycles of planning, action and reflection. In the case of blogging research involvement of others is unplanned, casual, and fragmented. It is those characteristics that make involvement of others especially valuable (re: exposure and unexpected connections across boundaries), they difficult to account for methodologically.

• Action research vs. ethnography?
• Virtual methods seminar
• Paper - Five Lenses: Towards a Toolkit for Interaction Design

Judith Olson in HCI remixed (my sneaky reading when I don’t want to do any PhD writing):

But for me, probably the most important filter on whether or not something is interesting is to tell someone the story. This is a variation on the old saw, “I don’t know what I think until I hear what I say.” In the act of telling the story to someone else, you attempt to frame it in its most interesting surprising way. And, then by seeing the reaction, you can tell whether it is truly interesting or not. (p.232)

That’s why blogging as a way to write research works for me - it’s telling stories to someone else.

I spent half a day  “jumping between dissertation and wordpress since I don’t know where the piece I want to write should go first” (twitter). Finally wrote it as a dissertation section. Decided to blog - and then immediately saw where it has to be revised. Remembered the quote from last night’s reading. Had to write this post.

• Time in blogging: writers time and readers time
• Process of growing ideas: from fuzzy feelings to finished results
• Difficult writing for BlogTalk

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.

***

A closer look at the role of blogging in supporting networking between bloggers indicates two different uses of weblogs in that respect: weblogs are used for publishing and for interaction.

When attracting or finding others, getting to know them from a distance or staying in touch, the roles between blog writers and blog readers are distinct: bloggers write, readers learn from that. The relation is similar to one of a book authors and their audience: no need for reciprocity and direct interaction appear as an advantage, allowing bloggers to write “to the world”, since their readers can pick and choose what to read and what to do with it. The coverage of one’s life and thinking in a weblog is similar to the one of celebrities done by mass media; it helps to learn about the blogger, but does not really help to build a relationship.

When it comes to bonding through interaction blogging is different. During his interview Martin talks about weblogs as “alive, living, published now”, for him “it’s a conversation going on instead of publishing exchange” that gives the feeling that “people are there”. To have such conversation both reading and writing are essential; bloggers and their readers become participants. While some bloggers are more likely to “reach out” than others, once conversation started it is about give and take that comes from all parties involved, reciprocity and direct interaction become essential.

The study results indicate that blogging supports both, publishing and interaction. Blogging as personal publishing is about broadcasting to broad and often unknown audiences allowing efficient communication, while blogging as interaction is about engagement with specific others that builds shared understanding and enables bonding. While those two functions result in positioning blogging as a hybrid genre that has elements of personal webpages and asynchronous communication tools (Herring et al., 2004) I would argue that weblogs might be used as both at the same time.

Michelle Gumbrecht (2004, p. 2) brings the common ground theory to explain how addressing both, close friends and strangers, is possible in a single weblog post. She discusses one of her respondents, Lara, who blogged about “an ongoing personal situation that she needed to resolve, but she never detailed in specific”:

The sweeping generalizations (”I know that everything will work out in the end, because it always does”) and the undefined context of the situation illustrated that Lara believed that her intended audience (probably close friends) knew what she was referring to, she didn’t want to bare all of the facts to the entire Internet audience, or both. The manner in which she framed her post is key to manipulating what is termed “common ground”-the way in which people achieve mutual understanding [2]. Common ground is used generally within the confines of immediate social interaction, but the terminology is applicable here as well. Through accumulation-the manner in which common ground is constructed-Lara and her close friends accrued a great deal of shared knowledge through their previous encounters [4]. By virtue of this knowledge, Lara’s friends would be able to understand her posts without her going into excruciating detail. On the other hand, acquaintances and strangers are privy only to the surface information presented in the post. Without the benefit of shared knowledge and experiences with Lara, they do not have the inside track on her situation. In a paradoxical manner, Lara managed to maintain privacy within a public medium.

In similar way Ton discusses two roles that his weblog play in respect to networking. For people, he is already connected to, it’s a place to think aloud and to reflect, to get to deeper exchanges: “when I write my network is imagined audience”. At the same time weblog is a “gravity pull”, “a starting point for new relations”, that may or may not grow as a result of people stumbling upon his posts.

From this perspective, writing a weblog post allows communicating to both close friends and unknown others. Next to it, viewing blogging as publishing allows writing on “whatever I find interesting” for “whom it may concern”, impossible in direct interpersonal communication, knowing that friends will read between the lines and pick it up when relevant. If others react to a weblog post, it also becomes part of an interaction that contributes to bonding. The power of blogging in respect to networking seems to come from an opportunity to combine two modes with one tool.

• Blogs are smokescreens as much as windows
• Out-of-the-box thinking
• Most common words of BlogWalk participants

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.

• Email vs. k-logging: from personal perspective
• Business blog links
• Link

This post is kind of related to the blog networking study, but please treat it as not very scientific thinking in a middle of the night. It’s on the study results in respect to presenting oneself through blogging.

One issue that is not really clear there is how intentional is shaping one’s own image through blogging: from one side, bloggers do make choices about if, what and how to write in their weblogs, from another - they seem to let things emerge through their writing.

Weblogs are easily viewed as a space for identity management (re:Goffman) where blogging is a frontstage performance set to impress the audience in a particular way. I feel that blogging is rather a backstage, where you can be yourself, even if it’s in public. Like in this post by Fa Martin-Niemi:

We moved into a new modern flat a few months ago with lovely views of the harbour and ocean.  All I could think about is what we could see.  “Oh, look from this window and this one and the deck…”  What I hadn’t thought about was windows work both ways.  So one day when I was walking home, I looked up and noticed my son’s bed was unmade and he had toys all over the floor.  It took a second before I realised that if I could see this from the road, then so could all of the hundreds of people who walk and drive by our flat everyday.

Now, I am thinking that blogging may be similar.  I love reading good blog posts.  “Oh, look at this one and that.  Did you read the one about…?  Let me send you a link”  So when I created this blog all I could think about is all of the great views I could see.  But of course, this blog like most are public so every word I write can be seen by anyone passing by.  Not just by the friends and commenters who I know about, but also the unknown lurkers who happen upon it.

The funny thing is you get used to it.  I didn’t start closing the curtains when I realised that everyone could see in.  I didn’t even start cleaning.  I just decided that it comes with the territory.  If I want to look out, it means that others can look in.  So with blogging I am not going to close access and change my writing.  In fact, I welcome the casual readers.  Hope you are enjoying it, dirty laundry and all…

In the comments to the post on presenting oneself through blogging there is a discussion on why bloggers in the study post personal details on their blogs and how they might deal with unexpected audiences. My intuition (=did not check it properly with the data) says that it’s more of the discovering over time that “it comes with the territory” - it’s not only ok to be yourself (and personal), it is essentially the thing that brings those unexpected connections that are so valued.

Being yourself (like with good friends) - vulnerable, personal, multidimentional - in public, you meet others.  If weblog is an attractor, a “gravity pull” (Ton) then whatever you project outside “people will appear who appreciate that” (Martin). You start to “chat with people as they were your friends” (Dave) and they eventually become your friends. You start performing, they become an audience.

So, in a sense, performance is counterproductive.

It also takes more effort than being youself, since multiple audiences collide in one space and a performance means you have figure out how to play multiple roles at the same time. And it kills unexpectedness, since the performance defines the audience.

This also explains, why there are so many signs of “it wasn’t intented, just emerged that way” and “if you try to sell via blogging things go wrong” attitudes between the interview lines.

Still, why there is a struggle of how personal a weblog should be? My guess - while you can be yourself with friends, you probably do not want to be naked with all of them and even if you do not mind, you probably wouldn’t do it in a public place.

• Artefacts of a weblog-mediated relationship: a visualisation
• Gabriela Avram
• Complex domains and researcher accountability

I’m still alive, but quiet: struggling to come up with the first draft of the final chapter of my dissertation and preparing for a conversation at SPsquare research and dissertation fest tomorrow. I’ll be talking about some puzzling things in the blog networking study and my current explanations for them.

Slides and some notes are below, but since it’s very much work-in-progress it might be better to join the discussion tomorrow (20:00 GMT, Skype/phone, contact me for the details) or wait till I blog it.

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Puzzling things:

• asymmetries - see Getting to know others from a distance
• non-personal relations (”information relationships”, “no ties”) - see Dealing with a network expansion and filtering information it brings
• identity management? - see Presenting oneself trough blogging
• crossing boundaries - see Participants and their networks, Finding and being found, Presenting oneself trough blogging

Blog networking

• Finding and being found
• Getting to know others from a distance
• Bonding through interaction
• Getting things done
• Staying in touch

Publication vs. interaction - will add a link when blogged.

I use weblog of Nancy White as an example, so you may want to check it and the summary of interview with her.

Key publications I refer to:

• affinity/commitment/attention
  • 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
• crossing boundaries
  • Star, S. L. & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19(4), 387-420. doi:10.1177/030631289019003001
  • Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press.

• Tagging four things
• BlogTalk 2.0: Panel 2 - blogging beyond webpublishing
• Re-reading my own weblog and research blogging

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.

• Euan Semple
• BlogWalk Seattle: people
• Weblogs as mushrooms

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.

• Networked identity
• Information overload: questions
• Blog networking study: interviews

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.

***

When connections are established weblogs provide a way to stay in touch regardless the degree of interaction between bloggers at any particular moment. Martin noticed that after he stopped blogging, reading other weblogs become even more important, “to see what [his contacts] are up to without having to interrupt them, to contact them directly”. Gabriela gives an example of former colleagues who are following her weblog to find what is happening in her life “without sending an email”.

When the participants talk about the weblogs they read regularly, those usually include weblogs of people they know well. “For the people I know I read to find out how they are going”, says Shawn. He does so to find out “if there is something important to ring them up” and tells that it often prompts “some other way of communicating with the person”.

For Ton keeping up with others’ “online traces” (blogs and other channels) helps to maintain a relationship. He emphasise the importance of trivial exchanges (e.g. updates on Jaiku or Twitter - “I’m having a coffee”) that create a sense of connection similar to the same type of exchanges with people in a close physical proximity. It is the similar for Luis, who says that Twitter provides a space to share “titbits on what I’m doing” resulting in a sense of “ambient intimacy” , while weblog is for “more elaborate thought” or Gabriela, who “keeps an eye on people via microblogging and other tools”, picking up their weblogs once in a while to read in more detail.

Ton suggests that once connections are established the intensity of interactions might decrease:

In the beginning you also have to show each other that you are making and effort, to may be seduce each other a bit. Network starts by giving [...] and part of it is an attention and an empathy; you have to make the effort first.

He tells that after a while it’s different, still an effort, but very different type of interactions:

Even if there is no interaction I still see the connection [...] I see other people coming online with their status updates [e.g. on Skype]. There is no real interaction, but I know that he sees me coming online as well.

When connections are established and there is less need to interact, weblogs provide a way to keep up with life and thinking of their authors without directly contacting them. However, many bloggers also stay in touch via other tools. Microblogging tools are mentioned often in this context; they are used for sharing mundane updates and details of everyday life, creating a sense of connections similar to those that appear when sharing a physical space with co-workers.

• Blog networking, blogwalking and being a boundary subject
• Weblog-mediated relationship: a co-constructed narrative
• Ton Zijlstra

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.

***

When I ask about the role of blogging in making possible to do something together, Martin describes how relations grow from shallow to more deep, starting from a shared interest and then eventually building an image of someone as trustworthy. Others describe similar process of gradual engagement that builds a foundation for working together: the knowledge of common interests and shared context (Gabriela), “a feeling that just talking is not enough and there is a shared need to do something together” (Ton) and “trust which is crucial for collaboration” (Luis).

In addition, weblogs help to make a decision about “doing business” with a blogger. For example, while Nancy doesn’t keep track of how her weblog contributed to her business, she assumes it to be “a kind of screening device” where potential clients can check her background. Ton tells a story about a client worried that he would take a technology-driven approach to work on a case, who then became reassured it wouldn’t be that way after reading Ton’s weblog. Such “screening” might also work in the opposite way, as for Dave who “certainly used weblogs of some people to decide not to collaborate with them”.

Sometimes bloggers find difficult to isolate the role of their weblogs in working together. Shawn gives an example of getting to know Nancy through her blog and other online activities, inviting her to stay in his house when she travelled to Australia, and their collaboration that followed. He also tells about potential clients contacting him as a result of blogging to ask for a meeting: “it might turn into business or may not, it’s a beginning point”. For Ton joint work often had “started somewhere in a weblog” and then “spilled over to other channels”. For him meeting people in person before being able to work with them is essential; he has to “look in their eye”, to see “the whole person” next to knowing about their shared interests from blogging.

While meeting another blogger in person is often cited as part of the process that led to working together or a prerequisite for it, it is not always the case. Martin tells about several of “only online” relations that turned into joint work: “the way we worked together fits the image I’ve got from blog interaction, there were no big surprises”.

When it comes to doing the work, often a weblog is not a primarily tool to do so. For Gabriela “email or twitter is the easiest way” for contacting bloggers and not a weblog, which is “slower”:

When I don’t need a quick answer and its something related my blogpost, I leave a comment or write a post myself. If I have a concrete idea and want to put it in practice now, I use other tools.

Luis comments that embedding blogging into the workflow of day to day interactions is not easy: while email is part of work, blogging still feels as an extra.

For Martin blogging is good for learning and exploration, but “a different mode is needed” to get things done. He notices that for him it is easy to confuse work with online interactions, indicating that at times blogging might have a negative impact on work: “I have to pull myself out of conversations and learning to do my work [...] to get things done offline… to write that article…” He adds that for some jobs blogging might be a better fit, giving research as an example.

Euan suggests weblogs are good for supportive activities: “in a sense of establishing, sharing [...] they are great tools, probably better than face to face”, however, “in a context of making something happen there is a limit to how far you can go.” He explains that weblogs have a different rhythm: “if you want to set up a meeting you wouldn’t pontificate about life, universe and the such…”

While weblogs of the study participants are work-related, they do not necessarily document their work. Ton says his weblog includes reflective writing “on the edge” of what he is doing. He explains that does not chronicle what he does in his weblog since it would involve his colleagues and clients. He adds that he started to feel more free do to so after starting to work for himself (”they are completely my projects, so it says more about me now”) and, although content-wise his work didn’t change much, now he also needs “to be a bit more visible as an individual consultant”.

Working in organisational settings adds other concerns to blogging about work. For example, while Gabriela did field studies with IBM, she couldn’t blog about work as “smallest detail could provoke some damage”; she wrote about concerts instead. Euan talks about the challenges of blogging in a case when individuals are exposed to an audience “only in controlled circumstances”. He talks about writing while in BBC as “generalising the topic” that “it stays interesting without compromising anything.”

In sum, blogging provides a foundation for working together by allowing to choose with whom to work with and by building shared understanding and trust. When it comes to doing the work itself or reporting about it, a weblog is not necessarily the tool to choose since such work requires a different mode of writing and interaction and might not benefit from being visible in a weblog.

• Stephanie is coming to NL
• Blog networking study: staying in touch
• Blog networking study: getting to know others from a distance

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.

***

Next to an opportunity to learn about others from a distance, weblogs support interaction that may grow into a relation between bloggers over time. When Ton describes how interactions that start from comments help a relation to grow and strengthen, he talks about his weblog as a “gravity pull”: “it’s like they are entering your gravity field, falling towards you”.

Luis emphasises the importance of reacting to comments in his weblog as a starting point for an interaction (”last thing you can do is to ignore your comments”) telling that others appreciate the feedback. While Shawn also believes that interaction in the comments is important, he admits that he is not good in it as he uses his weblog mainly to organise his thinking rather than “as a network building or communication device if you like”. He tells that he is “not much of the typer” and leaves comments only if he “can add to a conversation in a constructive way” and then starts wondering what other people “read” into this behaviour. He also gives an example of Johnnie Moore, saying that his blogging style “seem to have the interaction going”.

Nancy echoes this point emphasising that engaging in personal connections (as opposed to “information relations” described in the section 1.5.1) depends a lot on personalities of people, as some as more likely to initiate contact and to “reach out”. Brett provides an example of others “reaching out”:

I’ve had people I’ve left comments on their blog and by doing that they discover mine and they initiated contact with me. [...] they commented on the weblog and followed it more closely [...] I guess [they were] more involved, did more steps for a relation than I did. I just commented once and they came to my site and commented frequently. To some extend it makes you feel an obligation almost to go back to theirs to read it more, to comment more. [...] I feel that I should look at their stuff more closely to see if I want to reciprocate.

Although initial contacts often happen in comments to a weblog post, at the later stage cross-linking between weblogs and trackbacks that notify bloggers about it becomes more important. For Luis linking conversations between blogs helps to “corroborate what someone else said” while also adding own experiences and sharing with others. For Euan permalinks that allow others to link directly to a weblog post “is another big thing” as “each of those little ideas could be linked to and that allows to distribute sense-making networks.” Martin describes conversations that “travelled around weblogs” as “collective intelligence” (”if we talk about questions long enough the idea would emerge somewhere”). In discussing how blogging helps to develop trust Dave talks about it as “fragmented frequent conversation” and draws parallels between blogging and the way human brains work:”We don’t tell stories to each other, we swap anecdotes and blogs are very similar to that”.

When I ask Ton about the differences between comments and conversations across weblogs he refers to the differences in format and length, as well as different types of conversations they enable:

…the comments are usually short-lived, [...] they are immediate responses to the blog post. And a blog conversation spread between weblogs goes on longer. And you can connect it to more things since if you would add links to six different blog posts in your comment it would probably be classified as a spam.

However, he thinks that those different weblog conversations are part of the same process, talking about difficulties of reconstructing paths one follows between comments, people, what they write.

Interaction via weblogs often serves as a starting point for getting in touch via other channels. Shawn suggests that “if someone got the weblog, they are inviting people to contact them” and adds that this is usually the case when he attempts to contact other bloggers by email. He adds that when contacting another blogger, the fact of both blogging creates a commonality, even if content is very different - “I am a blogger, you are a blogger, we should catch up”. Brett calls it “an instant credibility”:

Even if I don’t know someone just the fact that I saw something on their blog, posted a comment, asked a question and they see that I have one. It establishes almost an instant credibility: that this person is worth the time to respond, to read, as to say.

Gabriela explains that having weblogs that provide the context and the history of previous interactions makes contact easier: she feels she can “tap into knowledge of fellow bloggers without [providing] any details”.

Many participants talk about connecting with fellow bloggers via multiple channels. Gabriela gives an example of Jack Vinson, KM blogger she’s never met in person, and says they are mutually connected on different channels. Shawn is not constantly interacting with other bloggers via the blogosphere, saying that if it happens it’s often an email, phone or meeting in person. Luis talks about enhancing his connection with KM bloggers by knowing about their day to day life from Twitter.

For Martin other, more personal channels are needed to get to know others really well “to have a more secure exchange which is not public, to be vulnerable”, which is difficult to do in a weblog “once you become an A-lister”. Ton adds that for those relationships that are established via weblog, most of more personal communication happens via other channels (email, Skype, sharing photos and videos).

Meeting in person is often an important part of the process of building a relation: bloggers tell stories about making an effort to meet other bloggers or synergies of connecting in person after discovering that those they knew via blogging were actually in close physical proximity.

When bloggers meet the history of their interactions comes into play. Luis talks about meeting Bill Ives for the first time, while knowing him via weblog for several years:

It was amazing. [...] It was like two old pals talking about KM and picking it up where we have left it in the blogs.

Euan gives similar example:

First time I met Doc [Searls] there were hugs and smiles and really energetic enthusiastic conversation in a restaurant. And we said at that time that others in the restaurant had known that we’ve never met each other they would think we were mad.

Ton explains that meeting in person brings a relation at a new level. He gives an example of meeting Chris Corrigan and how walking in the forest having “the same conversations” they would have online, created a deeper level of understanding:

Rereading his postings I now hear his voice, but I also know in what kind of context he wrote it, and this additional information helps me interpret what he means on a deeper level.

Martin has similar experiences: “[realising] that they actually have a body helped to appreciate their writing more and use their writing more effectively”.

However, Dave is not sure meeting in person is good or bad after getting to know each other online, as some people “create a different persona in their blog” and meeting in person might results in “identity structure shifts”. When I refer to other bloggers who are eager to meet in person, he tells it depends on a scale: “I can’t afford the time to meet everybody I track or listen to”.

Interacting via multiple channels over time does not only help the connections grow and strengthen, it also contributes to the development of shared understanding and a sense of community. “And then you are talking not about silos [...], but interconnected complex network of blogs”, where bloggers know whom to go to for help or an advice (Luis). Gabriela talks about other bloggers as “permanent support network”, “a sort of fraternity” that she can rely on.

While first interactions between bloggers often happen via weblogs, as relations between bloggers grow they engage with each other via multiple channels. In that respect conversations created by linking between weblogs play a special role: those “fragmented frequent conversations” support both collective development of ideas and strengthening the bonds between bloggers. Over time meeting in person and other channels are added to the mix to continue blogging conversations, to interact in more private and secure settings and to get to know others better. Over time those interactions create a foundation that might enable bloggers to collaborate to get things done together.

• Networked identity
• BROG: blog research, visualisations & sushi
• Beyond personal webpublishing: An exploratory study of conversational blogging practices

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.

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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&