I intended to blog my notes from the sessions, I really did. But… I have been too busy. I also think the backchannel had an impact. Previously I’ve blogged sessions as a way to process them… this year I processed more via Twitter, and, I’ll be honest, being more social in between sessions.

I had a great time, though. And now I’m being bitten by the fact that I assigned a 3-essay midterm to my 30-person class right before I left. Only 45(ish) more essays to grade!

I’m here, I’ll blog session notes and twitter @sarah_m_ford.  If anybody’s looking for a banquet ticket for Saturday night, let me know because I’m trying to sell mine!

In the past week or so, two surveys related to privacy online have come through my Inbox.

From the University of Bath:

We are running a study to understand how everyday situations (both offline and online) that may pose privacy concerns are appraised. We hope to discover the types of judgments most prevalent in privacy infringements. This survey takes at most 20 minutes to complete and your responses are anonymous. I would be grateful if you would consider participating and forwarding to others who could assist us.

http://luminainteractive.com/questionnaire.htm

There was another one about facebook and privacy but I’ve deleted the e-mail and my bookmark is not working.  Perhaps it’s closed already.

I will be presenting a paper entitled “LiveJournal:Critical.  Learning from the Layoffs” at Internet Research 10.0 in Milwaukee in October; in it, I am looking at LJ users’ reactions to the layoff news and specifically examining why many of them stated that they would not consider Facebook as an alternative to LiveJournal.

And at the same time, I’m noticing LJ use declining.  My own, to be sure… my personal blogging took a hit when I started my observational data collection.  It was like the “blogging” part of my brain was completely taken up by having to track 27 blogs every day.  But I’m also twittering more, and doing more, yes, on Facebook.  I’m not the only one to have noticed this, though – a non-academic friend commented to me that her LJ friends have been posting less, too.  I’m not sure what’s going on there… but let’s let October come before my paper is obsolete before its time!

Ahem. See how there’s NO NUMBER next to the folder named “Un-Coded Blog Entries”? That’s right… after MONTHS of being behind on coding these data, I am CAUGHT UP as of this morning.  There were a couple of particularly pesky ones that languished there while I pondered and thought about how to code them.

The next folder down, the “Partially-Coded Blog Entries” are ones that I have coded but I don’t think I’m completely happy with the codes that I’ve chosen.  I’m paying down that debt as well, and trying really hard to pay it down faster than I create it.

One of the major challenges for me as I write this dissertation is that I’m for all intents and purposes doing my dissertation “by correspondence”.  (And yes, I have actually taken correspondence courses… before the Internet.)  this means that I don’t have regular meetings with my committee, or a working group to share writing with, or any kind of regular interaction around my research.  When we first moved here, I tried to start up what I called the “Itinerant Sociologists Club” but that idea fizzled basically immediately.  I occasionally chat with folks in whatever department I happen to be teaching in during any given semester, but I haven’t formed any long-lasting intellectual friendships.  Some of this is my fault, and some of it is just… adjunct hell + PhD by correspondence.

Since the first of the year, though, I have a new system.  I am writing regular “status updates” that are getting circulated to my advisor as well as some interested friends.  This serves two purposes – it gets me feedback on the things I’m thinking about AND it’s writing that will eventually make it into the dissertation itself.

My first update laid out some of the early correlations from the survey.  There are some interesting patterns emerging, but I haven’t worked out exactly what it means yet.  I did make a whole lot of extra-shiny graphs in Numbers, though!

For the next one, I’m comparing the demographics of my survey “sample” to other studies of bloggers.  The two best comparison cases so far are the Pew report on bloggers from 2006 and the October 2008 State of the Blogosphere report.  Tomorrow I’ll be looking at a couple of earlier SotB reports as well.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what is known as “stats face”.  It is the face that I make anytime I have to work with statistics… and those forehead lines are threatening to become permanently etched in my face.  We’ll just call them war wounds, shall we?

I’m wading through the open-ended questions from my survey, looking at correlations between codes.  For the most part, the numbers are looking like I would expect them to.  In this process, though, I have learned something useful about myself.  I cannot look at a pile of statistics and see the sense in the numbers; I need those numbers to be translated into words.  I have to take a negative correlation and say, “OK, so if a person defines blogs as public, they are more likely to also reference searchability” or some such thing.  And so, in the spirit of really getting my hands dirty with it, I’m looking at it in a million different ways… output from statbase (a lovely little lightweight number-cruncher) which makes my eyes bug out almost immediately, written out as sentences in a Journler entry, and as a table in Numbers where I can sort it.  Labor-intensive, yes, but the more ways I look at the numbers, the more likely I am to actually be able to make sense of them.

Look for another upcoming post on the difficulties of doing a “dissertation by correspondence” and what I’ve been doing lately to overcome those obstacles.

LiveJournal announced yesterday that they have cut a significant proportion (20%) of their US workforce (marketingvox story) and there has been much hand-wringing of the “where do we go from here?” sort amongst my LiveJournal friends.

For my personal blogging… I like LJ for the security features it provides, and some of what I post there probably would just never get written in any “public” forum if I didn’t have those features.  But for my personal blogging, I can live without it.  I can connect with friends on Facebook, I can blog here and at my hobby blog and at my kid’s blog and I can turn what has been my media consumption blog / personal website into the personal blog.  No big deal for me.  (I have archived my five years of LJ postings, though… I would hate to lose all of that.)

The dissertation, on the other hand…  65% of my dissertation participants use LiveJournal.  If LJ stops existing, I will have to figure out what to do.  Either I go with the three months of observational data that I have already (instead of six) or I will follow those folks to any new services they migrate to.  Either way, it will be something to talk to those LJ users about when the time comes for interviews!  Yesterday I was in a total panic about it; today I’m a bit more zen.  I have the data, so all will not be lost even if the service disappears at the end of the week like some of the doom and gloom folks were predicting yesterday.

Conversation in our house this evening:

M: what’s your plan for the evening?
Me: archiving data.
M: didn’t you do that yesterday?
Me: yeah, but the bloggers keep posting.  they’re pesky like that.

Research the dissertation.  Live the dissertation.  Be the dissertation.

This morning a link to this Wired article came across my Facebook home page (via David).  An excerpt:

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

My initial reaction was, “Um, no.”  I suppose, though, that it depends on what you consider to be the goal of blogging.  Is it about making your writing visible?  Is it about connecting with other people – whether they are known to you outside of blogging/the Internet or not?  Is it about making money?  It seems that Paul Boutin is excluding the last of these options… or is he?  He laments that if you look at the top 100 blogs according to Technorati, “you’ll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can’t keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.”  And yet… at least one of those top 100 sites – dooce.com – is written by one person (with the occasional guest post), and is a money-making venture.

Four years ago, Alex suggested that within a year we would no longer be talking in terms of blogs – that “blog” was an umbrella term and was not sufficiently descriptive to be meaningful.  (Sorry, man, I remember these things.)  He was right about the meaninglessness of the term, of course, and that sentiment is some of what the Wired article is getting at.  If you define “blog” as a journal or a space for personal writing,   I see the same thing when I look at my survey data; some bloggers define the term based on software, some based on the presence or absence of RSS feeds, or the presence or absence of comments.  (Interestingly, this would for the most part eliminate dooce, as Heather rarely enables comments.)  A handful of my respondents distinguish between LiveJournals and blogs, claiming that the former are not blogs but journals.  So where does that leave us?  If anything, the number of types of documents that fall under the heading of “blog” has grown, rather than shrunk, in the last several years.  And yet, we are still using the umbrella term.  If anything, we prepend a modifier – my dissertation is a study of “personal blogs”; there are also a lot of “tech blog” and “political blogs” and “whatever-you-want-to-call-them blogs”.

Does this mean that blogs are obsolete, as Boutin would have us believe?  That if you have something to say, you’re better off saying it via Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr?  I, as well as many of the commenters at Wired, disagree.  As they rightly point out, you can’t say much in the 140 characters that Twitter allows.  Flickr and Facebook are much richer environments but even they are simply not the same as the long-form writing that blogging allows.  Facebook may allow more than 140 characters but it still favors short bursts of communication – a status update, a (super)poke, a wall post.  Yes, a person can use notes and posted items in much the same way that one uses a blog, but that is decidedly not the culture of Facebook.  On Flickr, everything is premised around the image.  Sure, you can write as long a description of the photo as you want, and include HTML.  There are plenty of people who use their Flickr photostreams in the way that a person could use a personal blog – a notable example is Eric Snowdeal, who posts identical entries on both Flickr and one section of his blog.  I have to come back to the fundamental difference, though, in that on Flickr the primary subject is the image.  On a blog, on the other hand, the written word is front and center.  Sure, there may be multimedia support of the written word.  In some posts, the multimedia elements may even take front stage.  But at some point, somewhere, a blog is about communicating and that communication is still best accomplished via language.