Prompt me a life

[see: Blogger's block]

The link above features in the weblog of blogger.com. Whilst I think these prompts-for-writing are pretty rubbish (an example: What would you do if your jelly sandwich landed jelly-down?) it's worth commenting that blogger.com thinks it should feature something like this. Evidently they recognise that people don't know what to write about in their weblog.

Warwick Blogs also recognises this and has a Prompts page. Plus it also has a Stuck for Ideas to Write About? Try these... button bang in the middle of its front page. The last suggestion in the Prompts was December 2004. Last entry in Stuck for Ideas was April 2005. My guess is that new bloggers are the ones who don't know what to write about. New bloggers think that they have to write exciting and entertaining weblogs. They think that their weblog must be a performance piece. Warwick Blogs has been up and running for a fair while now (start of academic year 2003/2004?). So students have found a use for their weblog... and don't need inspiration from prompt lists? [The same applies to blogger.com. There is a doubling of weblog numbers every 5 months, so blogger.com has an insatiable succession of new bloggers possibly unsure about what exactly they do with this technology?]

The interesting thing, when you read all the suggestions from these 3 sources, is that many of them are superlatives? You answer questions about the best, the first, the worst, the most, when you retire, your baby. They force you to reflect on milestones and memories... and not the daily minutiae. It is the minutiae which endears bloggers to oneanother, and builds community. It is the minutiae which differentiates one blogger Personality from another. it is the minutiae which identifies us as real and unique, and not a collection of check-box answers. I am not alone in despising the phoney personality these prompts extrude from us. Fuck Off.

What is unique about the personal weblog is that you write in an authentic voice about the things you are interested in. Which is normally your daily grind, the people in your life, and your projects/dreams. I'm not convinced that you need to adorn (detract from) your weblog with these accoutrements of phoneyness and same-ness.

[tag: writing]

Academic blogging

[see: Rob O'Toole]

Rob writes about why and how he uses Warwick Blogs for his academic work in his PhD in Philosophy. I have pulled out the following comments, as being ones I find insightful:

1. I do not want to risk getting involved with interactions that detract from my precious research time.
   
2. I also do not want to have to spend much time managing these interactions.
   
3. I need to have interactions with other philosophers in which we can share concepts, terminology, interests, entities, but without always directly engaging in a debate. We need to know each others territories and directions of movement, and know how to connect with them when required. We need to be able to pass around, try out and develop new concepts, without always having a direct debate about them.
   
4. The problem is 1) to avoid isolation, with my research becoming irrelevant and obscure; 2) to avoid getting involved in debates and misunderstandings that detract from my own research development.
   
   In short, we need to constitute a collective 'milieu' in which our own individual developments may occur.

Wrt management of unwelcome or banal comments Rob says It seems that the overhead of this extra commitment outweighs the milieu building power of blogs. First of all he makes a distinction between:

1. entries that I have written simply to position myself within the milieu;
   
2. and those in which I am looking for a more direct response.
   

Rob is either making statements, or Rob is inviting comments. He doesn't allow commenting in the first example, and will include an email link with an invitation for readers to email him if they have anything interesting to say. The second example is given open comment permissions, but ends with definite guidance as to what kind of responses he is after.

[tag: community]

A place for sycophancy?

[see: Don't be a jerk (Blog language)]

Evidently the corporate weblog world differs from that of personal weblogs - with respect to speaking your mind. Authenticity, by contrast, is valued in personal blogging, as the previous post confirms. For a personal weblog losing a few bloggers who no longer like what you are saying is not really a problem. However for corporate bloggers this is something for concern. Business bloggers are given this advice: "Don’t attack. Other bloggers will see it and avoid you like the plague." In a personal weblog speaking your mind, as a post or comment, is entertaining... and engaging. We applaud free speech in the blogosphere... unless you are a business, it appears. Damage limitation seems to be at the front of coroporate bloggers' minds.

[tag: writing]

Bloggers know what is genuine

[see: Suw Charman and John Dale]

1. The curse that is management-speak: Management-speak and marketing-speak are the sort of language which blogging in general abhors. "When businesses use words that are fundamentally at odds with the every day experience that we have of them... that's when people just turn off, put them in the 'deluded wankers' category and move on to much more down to earth sources of information, such as blogs."
   
   
2. Most readers ignore Lists, Lyrics and Quizzes: Most readers of blogs don't much care for blog entries which are online quiz answers, entries which are lists of (short) answers to questions, or entries which simply cite the lyric of a song without any further commentary or analysis. Most readers just blank these types of entries, scrolling right past them without looking at them at all, or just glancing very quickly over them.

Both are examples that the blogosphere, and bloggers are discerning. They demand that the subject matter and the writing be authentic - no jargon (marketese) or poor-quality content (quizzes, lists, lyrics). The medium of the weblog is the written word, and if the blogger does not use the written word in a way which is engaging, and personal then the readers will reject the weblog.

[tag: writing]

Theories of collaboration

[see: Stephen Downes speaks on online collaboration, at ALT-C]

I've not really thought before about why communities arise from within the blogosphere. Of course one of the reasons is the Communities of Interest reason: the family/friends, geography, hobbies/interests. But I'd not thought about the theories involved.

1. The Essentialist Theory (convergent, common purpose, same funding body etc)
   
2. The Exchange Theory (divergent, intrinsic motivation, interaction between autonomous and diverse entitites).

Tom Coates states: "Counter-intuitively the best, strongest, and most creative communities can emerge out of the interconnect nature of individual spaces." The Exchange Theory seems to fit weblog communities best.

Note to self: read about Exchange Theory of collaboration.

[tag: community]

Technorati's blogosphere

[see: Blog growth, Posting volume, Tagging, Spam, A-list & long tail]

Technorati's twice-yearly summaries clearly demonstrate that weblogs are not a fad, and growth/uptake has continued, and is sustained. Most notably the blogosphere continues to double every five months, with 55% being active. 13% of all weblogs are updated at least weekly - posting volume has doubled in the last 7 months. Weblog search and posting volumes responds to world events, and cause ripples in the blogosphere.

The webloggers appear to be comfortable with technology, as demonstrated by the following. About a third of all weblogs use tagging. More people are blogging from their camera-enabled mobile phones, using post-from-IM (AOL and MSN), using tools which post directly into weblogs (Flickr), and tagging their photos and links (social bookmarks).

A growth in spam blogs and fake blogs has accompanied the growth of the blogosphere. However key industry players (AOL, Google, MSN, Six Apart and Yahoo) are working together to minimise this.

Weblog use is world-wide. Japan, Korea, China, France and Brazil as demonstrating enthusiastic growth. Tagging is growing in languages outside of English as well, with high adoption rates in asian languages like Chinese and Japanese.

[tag: context]

What does the writer get?

As mentioned earlier writing a weblog is mainly for the community element. If it weren’t then you would just used some form of desktop diary software, of which there are many to choose. There is something intimate about having your weblog read, and commented to. People have web-stats behind their weblogs so that they know how many people visit. And they are affected when the stats change... drop, or suddenly increase. They feel despondent, or excited respectively. There is a real skill to writing a good weblog. The first item which appears on the tips to blogging list is always to "Write about what you love". The idea is that the more engaged you are with your subject the more interesting you blog will be. So, there we have it, in a nutshell, weblogs are written about things that the bloggers are interested in.

[tag: writing]

Why read a weblog?

Weblogs are a socially constructed reality in which the Reader’s contribution equals that of the Writer. It is a phenomenological reality. Despite having contrary perspectives the expectations of both parties are interdependent, and symbiotic. The reasons people read weblogs differ from the reasons they are written. Both parties have a contract to do their bit.

Why do people read weblogs? I’m sure there are as many reasons for reading weblogs as there are readers, but in my opinion the two main ones are voyeurism and information gathering. Voyeurism is easy to understand: people enjoy reading about other people. People feel that they can identify with the person behind the weblog, which makes their content more compelling. Each entry we read we get to know the writer better, we identify with them, or occasionally aspire to be like them. Cultural behaviours like our love of gossip, our interest in celebrities and reality television, and our enthusiastic consumption of biographical publications would appear to support this suggestion. The format of the weblog makes it easy to get up-to-date information about friends, people, situations and interests making them ideal for information gathering. Weblogs provide a valuable filtering function by searching out articles from lesser-known sites. In addition to this the writer may provide supplementary facts or an alternative perspective to that of the corporate media.

[tag: identity]

How the community grows?

However willing the blogger may be to engage with the weblog community, and however amenable the underpinning technologies may be to the task... it is not easy. Most weblog audiences are small. The bulk of the web is read by 4 or 5 people, or is completely private. Weblog readers are usually those already known to the blogger: friends and family. With time people link to them and they will grow. Weblogs build relationships amongst interest groups, geographic groups, and friends and family. They spread virally through these groups, and cults of personality emerge as new weblogs are created.

Readers who express their opinions on their site will be interested in the responses to their comments and will return to read them. Commenters become invested in these conversations and come back to them. Ties in with Gilly Salmon 65% come back to read message board response. Bloggers amplify each other’s voice when they link to them. Having your stuff read by, and replied to, by someone else is an intimacy. What you then see is a messy extension of the blogger's identity by those who respond to them, and those they connect to. It is this connected identity which produces a multi-subjectivity, unique to online communities. Counter-intuitively the best, strongest, and most creative communities can emerge out of the interconnect nature of individual spaces. Empowers the development in an organic way of self-selecting communities of interest. Dissolves the geographical barriers (global interconnectedness).

[tag: community]

How a community develops?

The common denominator of all weblogs is personal publishing – and all bloggers who make entries in a weblog are doing this. Even though bloggers share their world with whoever is reading not all will want to be public, or be part of the weblog community. Bloggers, therefore, have to make decisions about their own publication and reciprocation, and whether they want to engage with the blogging community. Weblog software allows them to decide to whom they make content available, the level of privacy their weblog has, and the degree of interaction they want. Each weblog has the ability to be highly connected by utilising tools such as aggregators, blogrolls, commenting, specific site mentions, and trackback.

As mentioned earlier weblogs are personal publishing, and social software. Another argument for deflecting the focus away from the function of a weblog is that by not doing so the equally interesting social/community facet of weblogs... are overlooked. After an entry has been made in a weblog bloggers expect to be signalled and perhaps responded to. If not, why would they publish their thoughts on the Internet, instead of letting them sit in their personal files? We’ve already seen that bloggers demonstrated their willingness by making their weblogs public, and by having an identity.

[tag: community]

We want to be public

Being public, and having an identity are necessary requirements for sociability online. It would appear that the majority of bloggers do want to be public. 76% do not limit access/readership to their entries in any way (MIT). Furthermore most bloggers identify themselves: 55% of respondents provide real name, and 20% provide variant of real name.

[tag: identity]

The value of the personal

The personal voice, the conversational voice, is the heart of the weblog. It is the personal voice of the blogger which facilitates the social inclination of a weblog. Indeed the uncensored, uncontrolled voice is one of weblogs' greatest strengths. Each weblog has a human guide who you get to know, and we get to know them because the personal voice is idiosyncratic, authentic, devoid of marketese. Voice is an undeniably powerful authority, and the personal voice is one you trust. Because the voice is authentic it is subjective. The subjectivity describes our world as it matters to us – honestly - which explains why weblogs pull people together in a way that most published writing doesn't. There is genuine interest because we get to speak in our own voice, about things which matter to us, and there is persistence. You can come back, and the more you read the more you are getting to know me. This is why friendships start up between bloggers so easily - because we already know each other.

[tag: writing]

Public/private continuum

So, where might weblogs fit within the private/public continuum? Weblogs seem to straddle personal and social spaces, they are run and owned by us, yet are published into the public environment. Hence they are an example of the connected identity (as opposed to the private identity) i.e. what we do in public in relation to others. The selves on the web are unavoidably social. The blogger shares their world with whoever is reading, posting to a large anonymous readership. Rebecca Blood states that weblogs are a "disruptive technology because they have changed personal publishing so profoundly that the old rules no longer apply". This may well be the case, since we appear to be writing ourselves into existence on the web, one blog entry at a time.

[tag: identity]

Cultural shift: private to public

Blogging software, however is not a neutral technical conduit... it is a cultural artefact (van Dijck). Technology has responded to cultural change, that people can be public. Weblogs are representative of this change and offer an unprecedented opportunity for individual expression on a world-wide scale. It is the current cultural climate, where the private is mixed with the public, which propagates this. Weblogs can be seen to facilitate a social process of exchange and participation i.e. people are choosing to be public. Consequently this interplay between public and personal online has resulted in the line, which normally distinguishes between them, becoming very fuzzy.

[tag: identity]

Ease of publishing

Originally the concept of the web was that everyone could publish, connect, communicate. The truth was that provided you could write HTML you could have a website, and your voice could be heard. Conforming to this belief are most universities - they provide their students with webspace, yet their students do not make use of this space to create personal web pages (John Dale). It was the appearance of weblogs which represented a reinvention of the open-publishing philosophy of the web. Initially the early weblogs were made by web-enthusiasts – those who knew how to code a web page. However since the arrival of software such as Blogger the barriers to entering and owning a weblog are very low indeed. You just type your content into the WYSIWYG editor, press the Publish button – the copy is inserted into the template and FTP-ed to a server. The software provider even hosts your weblog for you. These new web-based tools enabled individuals with little or no technical expertise to to create weblogs easily and quickly. The weblog bandwagon-jumping turned into an explosion.

[tag: context]

Why are weblogs so popular?

Before discussing possible weblog metaphors I think it is important to briefly provide a historical context of the weblog phenomenon. Weblogs are referred to as a recent technology... because they have suddenly become very visible, and gone mainstream. However the first weblog appeared in 1997, in Robot Wisdom, an online magazine which used it for 'logging the web'. Since 2003 weblogs have exploded into view, a giant technological snowball, doubling in number every 5 months, one weblog created per second. Today there are 16.3 million, with approximately 80,000 more being added each day. Furthermore, two-thirds of those weblogs are still being updated 3 months later (Technorati ref). We are now seeing our third generation of bloggers: the first being Geeks, the second Extroverts, and the third are the Mainstream users (Hamish ref). Weblogs, and blogging, have become mainstream. In this we have undeniable confirmation that despite the confusion about What is a weblog for? people have found a use for them. A large number of people... people who continue to use them.

In light of this explosion of popularity we are prompted to question Why are weblogs so popular? and Why is blogging so popular? The underpinning WYSIWYG technology is regarded as the overarching reason for weblogs' success. And the cultural shift, from private to public, is believed to explain the unprecedented adoption of blogging. So, weblogs are social a software, they enable personal publishing... and they persist. Persistence is the final ingredient required to describe the weblog phenomenon. Persistence is the enticement the private needs to go public... or become social.

[tag: context]

Why weblogs are not understood?

There is genuine interest in weblogs, yet it is clear that they are frequently misunderstood. Weblogs exhibit an obstinate resistance to being categorised, and this causes frustration when trying to answer that most basic question: Why have a weblog? People have different understandings of what weblogs are and refer to them either in terms what they evolved from, or by suggesting analogues. The analogues concentrate on what the function of the weblog might conceivably be e.g. online diary, linklog, scrapbook, news filter, punditry page. No doubt these analogues (or sub-categories) arose to help those who are unfamiliar with weblogs make sense of what these sites are for i.e. to answer the Why have a weblog? question.

However the conflation of function and form is not helpful. If you must assign a function to weblogs then why not dismiss the ill-fitting sub-categories, and instead refer to them by their primary function: Personal Publishing? Even simpler would be to unshackle the weblog from an anticipated use, and define it not by its function, but by what it represents. It is worth pausing to remind ourselves that behind the personal publishing is a person, the blogger - hence the weblog is a manifestation of a person, the blogger. In their definitions of weblogs both Weinberger (2004) and Coates (2000) reject analogues of function, or any mention of precursors... and instead refer to weblogs simply as a Representation of a Person. This elegant definition uncouples weblogs from expectations of how they might be used.. and any subsequent corollaries regarding whether they are appropriate for those purposes. Having done this one can begin to search for a suitable metaphor which can help us order weblogs' seemingly disparate elements.

[tag: concept]

Coherance across metaphors?

Wrt my last post. Is there coherance across metaphors?

[tag: concept]

A metaphors works when...

Again, from Lakoff & Johnson.

A metaphors work when it satisfies a purpose, namely understanding an aspect of the concept.

Here are a selection of metaphors I have been thinking about. I'll spend some time, later, validating and explaining them.

Purpose	Metaphor
Where?	Middle Place
	Written World
	Walled Garden
	Cyberhome
	Third Space
	The Confessional
What?	Performance Art
	2-way Mirror
	Mosaic
	Strobe Light
Why?	Living Online
	Confessional

[tag: concept]

Categorising weblogs

We, as humans, have a NEED to categorise. Our desire for Lumping of and Splitting into groups evolved to help us define what things are, and how they relate to us. We identify 'thing with wings and feathers' as Bird, and 'thing with big teeth' as Predator. All cultures share this innately human characteristic.

Culturally we have a passion for quantification, and an obsession with purposeful ends. We like to know what the purpose of something is. Perhaps this is why there is a conceptual struggle within the popular media as to what, exactly, a weblog is FOR and why someone might have one? And because there are as many uses for a weblog as there are bloggers* there is confusion about how to categorise them. They are regarded, hence, as a sub-category of Diary.

*Each weblog is unique, by virtue of it being their unique space-other-than-Real-Life.

[tag: concept]

Sub-categorisation

[see: Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p85)]

"Sub-categorisation and metaphor are end points on a continuum."

A weblog is a Diary: subcategory.
A weblog is a Mosaic: metaphor.

I am not convinced. I would have thought that sub-categorisation and analogue are end points on a continuum. Surely a metaphor is tangental to both analogue and sub-category??

[tag: concept]

The weblog as A Place

[see: Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p29)]

When speaking of Container Metaphors Lakoff & Johnson say: "There are few human instincts more basic than territorality. And such defining of a territory, putting a boundary around it, is an act of quantification."

I have been playing around with weblog metaphors such as Middle Place, Cyberhome, Written World and Walled Garden. Each of them suggest: Somewhere which isn't The Real World.

The territorality element is evidenced by the furniture bloggers put around their weblogs: e.g. the template and the third-party tools they choose. And also by the people they invite to their Somewhere-other-than-Real-World space: blogrolls, blogmaps (e.g. FeedMap), syndication, and enabling commenting. Both of these elements (how they decorate their space, and who they invite) are ways that identify that space as their own.

[tag: concept]