Category: 01d. Research and Studies

Just to blog our paper submitted for BlogTalk DownUnder 2005 for future reference 😐

In 1 week’s time, we will be flying to Sydney to participate in the Conference.
Our paper is but one of the many papers that has been brought online, thanks to James Farmer for his hard work and effort.
Getting excited about this trip as we’ll be able to hear and learn from the blogging gurus. Hope to gain as much as possible to return and share the learning.

Finished reading Audience, Structure and Authority in the Weblog Community by Cameron Marlow quite some time ago, only posting it now.
This article aims at studying the concept of authority among community of webloggers. The findings are based on hyperlinks collected by the Blogdex project. A social network analysis (Wellman 1997) is done to describe the social structure, and the two interesting measures of authority are suggested to be popularity measured by affiliation and influence measured by citation.
The social ties formed by the webloggers community are through means of blogrolls, permalinks, comments and trackbacks. Each mean represents a different type of social reference.
Main study focused on:
Blogroll implying social affiliation
Permalink implying thoughts passed from one individual to another
It is found that having a high blogroll degree rank (which indicates popularity) does not necessary translate into a high permalink degree rank (which indicates level of influence)

Just finished reading Blogging thoughts: publication as online research tool by Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker.
Though the article is written back in 2002, many of the things still hold true for blog, a genre as defined in the article. Looks like blog has more or less adopted its present form back then. Some of the interesting ‘findings’:
Blogger Pro, which provides more features, is available back then.
The Theory of the Public Sphere by J�rgen Habermas is used to describe/determine the private-public nature of blog.
One feel safe in his/her blog as you have total editorial control, and the posts are often short and unpretntious.
Rigours and formal citation practice in academic writing is practised in blogs through links. These links are random and it allows one to share experience (books read, website visted etc). These links are ‘vital to the genre‘.
Blog This by Henry Jenkins is the first article published on weblogs by an academic.
Expressing one’s thought in a blog may result in one losing his own ideas too early. This is one of the greatest fear of an academic, due to the current ‘reward system’ in the trade of academia.
The chornological arrangement of blog entries documents our thought processes. ‘Unedited, spontaneous, scrolling away‘ thoughts are always on the top of the page.
Popularity of a blog is determined by how often it is linked by other blogs/sites. Blogs tend to come together in clusters as they linked to each other.
The look and feel (visual appearance) of a blog is important.

Rather than focusing on a single tool, this piece will address a phenomenon which, for the example it sets, underscores the importance of new programs like BEAT. That phenomenon is both an idea and a set of tools known as personal Webpublishing -also known as weblogging, or blogging, after its most prominent form. Here, specifically, we will look at how weblogs are making an impacting on education.
By shortening and simplifying content publication and processing, personal Web publishing practices, like weblog authoring, content aggregation and syndication, and the formation of conversational networks, address a number of important needs of today’s learning environment. To keep things simple, here we will highlight just two -what might be called the two-punch power of weblogs in education.

The full article goes here.
[source: incsub.org]