1. Another from AlertBox, this time tips on Blog Usability:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/weblogs.html
2. An article from the NY Times, 2002 "TECHNOLOGY; A Rift Among Bloggers" about the reaction of the "veteran" bloggers (Kottke et al) to the insurgence of "war bloggers". Kottke compares it to hating seeing your favourite band go overground (''It's like being the punk-rock fan who was into punk rock before everyone else") - a tone which certainly comes through in Blood's book (which I'm rereading - a posting on that to follow.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/10/technology/10BLOG.html?ex=1024286400&en=e399bdc149d15532&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
3. An online article by psychologist John M. Grohol, entitled "Psychology of Blogs (Weblogs): Everything Old is New Again" - talks a little about the analogue, but not as useful as title suggests as he talks more about the similarities between blogs and online mailinglists than anything else. Also has links to other early articles about the psychology of blogging by the same author - not the most heavyweight of insights, useful though ...
http://psychcentral.com/blogs/blog_new.htm
4. An article by Travers, Uni. Washington, entitled "Blog Invasion! What Are They? Where Did They Come From?". A good source of references.
http://homepage.mac.com/dtraversscott/Academics/BlogHistory/index.html
5. Nielman Reports is a (student?) journal hosted at Harvard, looks like lots of articles about blogging as it relates to journalism:
http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports.aspx
6. Article from Wired announcing the demise of the blog in the face of Twitter, FB, etc. So soon?!
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/16-11/st_essay
7. Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere" 2008, figures and analysis:
http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
Sunday, 8 March 2009
More links
Another few links from Jakob Nielsen at Alertbox:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html
Summary: "In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action."
Which, given the supposedly participatory, inclusive power of these sorts of tools, is pretty damning - seems to be a new hierarchy, just a little more distributed. Includes some good stuff about improving usability and incentivizing the process to get more people involved.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
Summary: How people read websites: "Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/writing-reuse.html
Summary: "Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned." Talks about user studies involving the reading of blogs.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html
Summary: "In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action."
Which, given the supposedly participatory, inclusive power of these sorts of tools, is pretty damning - seems to be a new hierarchy, just a little more distributed. Includes some good stuff about improving usability and incentivizing the process to get more people involved.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
Summary: How people read websites: "Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/writing-reuse.html
Summary: "Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned." Talks about user studies involving the reading of blogs.
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
Gender differences
Today I’ve been happily ploughing through “Beyond Nostalgia: Aging and Life-Story Writing,” by Ruth Ray. It provides an excellent review of theories of life-writing, and I’ve harvested much grist for my mill. Among much other good stuff, there is an illuminating stretch of writing on gender difference in life-writing.
Ray notes that “men’s writing often takes the form of a continuous, public narrative or ‘autobiography proper,’ while women’s writing takes the form of private diaries, letters, notebooks, journals, and memoirs—discontinuous forms consistent with the fragmented, interrupted nature of women’s material lives.” (p24)
Ray quotes anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson’s reflections on gender differences in basic functioning in the world, where women, in contrast to men, are more “interested in the notion of reflexivity, of looking inward as well as outward.” She goes onto quote Margo Culley, who studied American diaries from 1764 to the present: “Those [diaries] kept by men, in particular, record a public life or are imbued with a sense of public purpose or audience.... Women diarists in particular wrote as family and community historians. They recorded in exquisite detail the births, the deaths, illnesses, visits, travel, marriages, work, and usual occurrences that made up the fabric of their lives.” Ray tallies the existence of such performative gender roles with the fact that women are more likely to keep personal journals than men. She quotes one study of 75 college students which found that only one male (of 35) kept a diary/journal of their own, while among the 40 women, the number was close to eighty percent, and that “young men were also much more likely to evaluate the genre of journals negatively than women.” (p13-4)
Given that the Herring, Scheidt, Wright and Bonus study, “Weblogs as a bridging genre,” found that most blogs (70.4%) were of the personal journal type, and that females were more likely to keep this more reflective, inward-looking type of blog, while the more outward looking filters and knowledge-logs were “created almost exclusively by adult males,” this is very significant for my investigation of blogging practices. Is would seem clear that gender (either through nature or nurture) largely influences the use of blogs as much as diaries/journals. Of course I’d known that gender differences would be an important point of investigation, but this perhaps makes clear how important ...
If I reflect on my own keeping this blog, I find that I’m using it mostly as a k-log, putting down thoughts, etc, related to my research. Even when writing reflectively (as now), my talk is confined very squarely to what I think about my research; I’ve not discussed myself yet, nor do I think I will. I think I just wouldn’t feel comfortable. I’ve not even really reflected on the progress of the PhD per se, although it’s early days of course. This, I suppose, is down to purpose of use. This blog has one (i.e., to reflect on blogging) and thus to stray outside of that domain of discourse, to start talking about personal feelings or events, would maybe feel like a breach of the rules. I’ve set those rules of course, and no-one is really listening anyway, so you could say it doesn’t matter, but those boundaries are an essential part of my keeping this blog. I think that if this were a depository for just any old thought, nothing would ever go into it due to a lack of focus. The deal is that I write about blogging, not myself.
I do wonder if I would want to make my own personal feelings a matter of public record. I think I would be most likely to do so only if anonymized, but then can’t see myself doing that if I can’t keep a diary anyway. Hmmm... Is all this down to gender? Hmmm ...
Ray notes that “men’s writing often takes the form of a continuous, public narrative or ‘autobiography proper,’ while women’s writing takes the form of private diaries, letters, notebooks, journals, and memoirs—discontinuous forms consistent with the fragmented, interrupted nature of women’s material lives.” (p24)
Ray quotes anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson’s reflections on gender differences in basic functioning in the world, where women, in contrast to men, are more “interested in the notion of reflexivity, of looking inward as well as outward.” She goes onto quote Margo Culley, who studied American diaries from 1764 to the present: “Those [diaries] kept by men, in particular, record a public life or are imbued with a sense of public purpose or audience.... Women diarists in particular wrote as family and community historians. They recorded in exquisite detail the births, the deaths, illnesses, visits, travel, marriages, work, and usual occurrences that made up the fabric of their lives.” Ray tallies the existence of such performative gender roles with the fact that women are more likely to keep personal journals than men. She quotes one study of 75 college students which found that only one male (of 35) kept a diary/journal of their own, while among the 40 women, the number was close to eighty percent, and that “young men were also much more likely to evaluate the genre of journals negatively than women.” (p13-4)
Given that the Herring, Scheidt, Wright and Bonus study, “Weblogs as a bridging genre,” found that most blogs (70.4%) were of the personal journal type, and that females were more likely to keep this more reflective, inward-looking type of blog, while the more outward looking filters and knowledge-logs were “created almost exclusively by adult males,” this is very significant for my investigation of blogging practices. Is would seem clear that gender (either through nature or nurture) largely influences the use of blogs as much as diaries/journals. Of course I’d known that gender differences would be an important point of investigation, but this perhaps makes clear how important ...
If I reflect on my own keeping this blog, I find that I’m using it mostly as a k-log, putting down thoughts, etc, related to my research. Even when writing reflectively (as now), my talk is confined very squarely to what I think about my research; I’ve not discussed myself yet, nor do I think I will. I think I just wouldn’t feel comfortable. I’ve not even really reflected on the progress of the PhD per se, although it’s early days of course. This, I suppose, is down to purpose of use. This blog has one (i.e., to reflect on blogging) and thus to stray outside of that domain of discourse, to start talking about personal feelings or events, would maybe feel like a breach of the rules. I’ve set those rules of course, and no-one is really listening anyway, so you could say it doesn’t matter, but those boundaries are an essential part of my keeping this blog. I think that if this were a depository for just any old thought, nothing would ever go into it due to a lack of focus. The deal is that I write about blogging, not myself.
I do wonder if I would want to make my own personal feelings a matter of public record. I think I would be most likely to do so only if anonymized, but then can’t see myself doing that if I can’t keep a diary anyway. Hmmm... Is all this down to gender? Hmmm ...
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
The blog in time
Following a supervision meeting this afternoon, the question floating around my head at the moment is how to link the temporalised "self", with the intention to blog. In writing this blog, for example - and to ignore for the moment the possibility of communicating (to temporarily quarantine the "other") - I produce an inscription and thus exteriorise what was heretofore interior (thoughts, ideas). Insodoing I thus allow myself to reflect on those thoughts in a different way. I gain distance from those thoughts, can see them in the cold light of the exterior world, examine them more "objectively". This reflection, then, relates to the present self. The intention to blog allows the present self reflection on itself.
Clearly, though, the blog is a memory object also. As I create these strings of words, whether consciously or not, I also open the possibility of memorialisation. My future self then has access to these reflections; it'll be able to remember (parts of) what it was like to exist at an earlier time, and in the similarities and differences exposed be able to explore what it is to be that person identified as "me". So (and whether consciously or not), I serve both my present and future selves in writing this, through reflection and memorialisation. To what extent, though, am I also serving my past self?
Perhaps, in laying those words down, in reflecting on who I am, I'm also betraying where I've come from. Perhaps I'm intentionally laying down memories, eulogising, reconstructing the past - and perhaps insodoing I'm idealising, mitigating, explaining, mourning. Perhaps the past self, from whence we've been thrown (in Heidegger's parlance), is always the subject of this life-writing, of this reflection. Maybe it's the Proustian search of lost time which lies behind any such activity; at the very least, the mourning of that (now past) lost time which prompts me to exteriorise my thoughts now, so at least some of the "now" doesn't get lost.
There are lots of perhapses there, but then these words themselves form only initial ideas of course, a train of thought, an exteriorisation of some things that have been on my mind. And quite rambling they are too ... perhaps a little too close to comfort to other post-modern musings. Do I want them to be published (broadcast? - are these only metaphors anyway?)? Well, it’s too late now, here they go ...
Clearly, though, the blog is a memory object also. As I create these strings of words, whether consciously or not, I also open the possibility of memorialisation. My future self then has access to these reflections; it'll be able to remember (parts of) what it was like to exist at an earlier time, and in the similarities and differences exposed be able to explore what it is to be that person identified as "me". So (and whether consciously or not), I serve both my present and future selves in writing this, through reflection and memorialisation. To what extent, though, am I also serving my past self?
Perhaps, in laying those words down, in reflecting on who I am, I'm also betraying where I've come from. Perhaps I'm intentionally laying down memories, eulogising, reconstructing the past - and perhaps insodoing I'm idealising, mitigating, explaining, mourning. Perhaps the past self, from whence we've been thrown (in Heidegger's parlance), is always the subject of this life-writing, of this reflection. Maybe it's the Proustian search of lost time which lies behind any such activity; at the very least, the mourning of that (now past) lost time which prompts me to exteriorise my thoughts now, so at least some of the "now" doesn't get lost.
There are lots of perhapses there, but then these words themselves form only initial ideas of course, a train of thought, an exteriorisation of some things that have been on my mind. And quite rambling they are too ... perhaps a little too close to comfort to other post-modern musings. Do I want them to be published (broadcast? - are these only metaphors anyway?)? Well, it’s too late now, here they go ...
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