Session: Bloggers & Blogging

This session featured two papers about blogging and two that were more about Internet research more generally. Presenters were Mary-Helen Ward on PhD blogging in Australia, Maria Bakardjieva and Georgia Gaden on blogs as a technology of the self, Denise Rall on how people become Internet researchers and Ulla Bunz on what AoIR conference paper titles tell us about Internet research.

Public and Private in the Blogosphere: Live!

No, it’s not the latest in traveling entertainment extravaganzas.  It’s much, MUCH more exciting than that.

It’s my survey of bloggers.  That’s right, the survey is officially live as of ten minutes or so ago.  If you’re a “personal blogger”, please fill it out, and pass it on to your friends (copy & paste HTML below).

<a href=”http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=YWpihoh7RtF_2fL0QyOU8IjQ_3d_3d”>Bloggers, stand up and be counted! Take the “Public and Private in the Blogosphere” Survey!</a>

Experience or share?

Ariel wonders…

Has blogging made it so that for me, the joy isn’t in having experiences, but in sharing them? If so, that’s sort of fucked up.

I’m not sure that it is weird to enjoy sharing experiences… I mean, there is something to be said for solitary enjoyment, but it’s also lovely to recount things, to fix them in memory, to impart some of the enjoyment of the experience to others in the re-telling.

The dangers of clipping

I’ve been using ClipMarks (my clips here) to excerpt & link webpages on my various blogs for a little while.  This past week, I ran up against some unintended effects of this practice of excerpting.  I had posted a clip of a UK Guardian piece about having kids vs. remaining child free to my LiveJournal.  In selecting the parts of the piece to clip, I was very careful to be even-handed in the excerpts (I made sure to include parts where the author is addressing the merits/drawback of both choices).  And yet, many of my readers reacted very strongly (and negatively) based just on the excerpts.  (I ultimately clarified my motivations for posting the excerpt and explained why I had found it interesting here.)

What caused the strong reactions?  (Besides the fact that it is a very polarizing issue upon which I have friends who are strongly on both sides.)  Was it a lack of familiarity with the technology?  Or did I run up against an interesting by-product of these excerpting-and-reposting technologies - namely, the ability to (in this case, unwittingly) change the meaning of another person’s writing Clearly my readers’ perceptions of the article were shaped by the portions that I chose to include in my repost.

What are the dangers of these technologies?  What are the advantages?  How are they changing the meaning of authorship?

The real reason why no one reads your (my) blog.

clipped from blindcopy.blogspot.com Ever wonder why the traffic to your blog is so terrible? I too am concerned about increasing my readership, so I decided to gather some information to help me decipher why my traffic sucks. What I found wasn’t encouraging. Consider the following facts: There are approximately 6.5 billion people in the world. Only 16%of the world’s population (1 billion people) have internet access. 16% of the world’s population is illiterate, which leaves only 840 million readers. Of that, only 20% of the world’s population speaks English, leaving 168 million readers. Only 30% of internet users read blogs, leaving 50 million readers. 50 million people, sounds like a lot right? Wrong! Technorati is currently tracking around 50 million blogs. That’s pretty simple math, 50 million blogs for 50 million readers. Therefore, with an average of only 1 reader per blog, then who’s reading your blog? That’s right, just you. Depressing, ain’t it?

Blogger interviews

I learned from one of the many blogs that I read that BBC Radio 4 did a series of interviews with bloggers. Thus far I’m only listening to Julie’s interview (which is interesting to me both as an academic and as a blogging parent) but I’ll definitely be listening to the others.

Stupid technological progress…

In my proposal (and probably in my eventual data-analysis), I’m grouping blogging systems by amount of privacy/security they offer. So you really have a spectrum* from LJ (most security features) to Blogger (fewest features). This is all well and good.

Except that then Blogger had to go and release their new beta. Which not only messes up my spectrum, but also will make my survey just a bit more complicated, because I’ll have to ask respondents if they’re using OldBlogger or BloggerBeta. Phooey. Oh well, I’ll survive. ;^)

*Damn… now I need to go make a graphic of that way to express it.

…

“When one is forced to talk incessantly, to have an opinion on everything, to always express oneself, there remains little room for thoughtful consideration of what one is saying (not to mention time ot listen to others.)”

(J. Macgregor Wise. 2004. An Immense and Unexpected Field of Action: Webcams, Surveillance & Everyday Life. Cultural Studies 18(2/3): 424-442. (p. 431)

He is writing about bloggers here… and often, it seems that he’s right.

That said, I’m going to use blogging as a means to force myself into actually making progress with daily “what I did today” updates. Working from home with no nearby institutional support is HARD.