I am pleased to announce that my thesis, ‘As if nobody’s reading’?:Imagined contexts and socio-technical biases in personal blogging practice in the UK is one of the first to be published in the LSE’s document repository (here) and is (to the best of my knowledge) the one of the first* LSE theses to be published using a creative commons (BY-NC) - something that required a certain amount of prodding of the relevant degree-granting authorities and which I hope will establish a precedent others can follow.

The full abstract follows below - I hope those of you interested in one or more of blogging, privacy, interpersonal interaction using computer mediated communication and the social construction of technology will find it useful and I would welcome comments and thoughts.

This thesis examines the understandings and meanings of personal blogging from the perspective of blog authors. The theoretical framework draws on a symbolic interactionist perspective, focusing on how meaning is constructed through blogging practices, supplemented by theories of mediation and critical technology studies.

The principal evidence in this study is derived from an analysis of in-depth interviews with bloggers selected to maximise their diversity based on the results of an initial survey. This is supplemented by an
analysis of personal blogging’s technical contexts and of various societal influences that appear to influence blogging practices.

Bloggers were found to have limited interest in gathering information about their readers, appearing to rely instead on an assumption that readers are sympathetic. Although personal blogging practices have been framed as being a form of radically free expression, they were also shown to be subject to potential biases including social norms and the technical characteristics of blogging services. Blogs provide a persistent record of a blogger’s practice, but the bloggers in this study did not generally read their archives or expect others to do so, nor did they retrospectively edit their archives to maintain a consistent self-presentation.

The empirical results provide a basis for developing a theoretical perspective to account for blogging practices. This emphasises firstly that a blogger’s construction of the meaning of their practice can be based as much on an imagined and desired social context as it is on aninformed and reflexive understanding of the communicative situation. Secondly, blogging practices include a variety of envisaged audience relationships, and some blogging practices appear to be primarily self-directed with potential audiences playing a marginal role. Blogging’s technical characteristics and the social norms surrounding blogging practices appear to enable and reinforce this unanticipated lack of engagement with audiences.

This perspective contrasts with studies of computer mediated communication that suggest bloggers would monitor their audiences and present themselves strategically to ensure interactions are successful in their terms. The study also points the way towards several avenues for further research including a more in-depth consideration of the neglected structural factors (both social and technical) which potentially influence blogging practices, and an examination of socialnetwork site use practices using a similar analytical approach.

* I have since discovered that Podromos Tsiavos managed to get his thesis about CC put through using a CC license in 2007.

One would like to think that the internet helps the best content reach the attention of the world. Ira Glass was recently interviewed by Jesse Brown who does an internet-centric radio programme called Search Engine. There I learned several interesting things (in no particular order)

• A promo spot to reach 1.8 million radio listeners to This American Life costs advertisers $5-8000. A similar spot to reach just over a half million podcast listeners, many of which may be from overseas and therefore not of interest to a US advertiser, costs $20,000. Is this just the glamour of a new medium in action?
• TAL is America’s most listened-to podcast even though it has not done any significant amount of marketing. (I think this says something about the demographics of public radio listeners as well as about the superb quality of the programming but it is still impressive).
• It follows that even most popular podcast in America is only listened to by .1% of the US population.
• The average listening time to TAL on the radio is 48 minutes - who said that people can’t concentrate in the new media age?
• The US Federal government only covers 4-7 percent of public broadcasting’s costs

The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released its State of the News Media 2009 report. It features a mini-analysis of the economics of online advertising for news organizations and it doesn’t make encouraging reading. In particular:

Even before the financial credit crisis hit in September, Veronis Suhler Stevenson projected that for the two online ad categories most oriented to news, display and classified, spending would reach $16 billion by 2012. If news sites represented 20% of that, it would amount to roughly $3 billion, or less than one tenth of what newspapers alone took in during 2008.

It’s all very well for new media pundits to tell news organizations to trim their operations to sizes that can be supported by new media revenues but as a society can we really afford to lose 90% of newspaper journalists?

CBC radio presenter Jesse Brown provides a succinct (< 12 minute) and entertaining audio summary of the varying predictions available of the future of news - the latest episode of his long-running internet news podcast, Search Engine. This segment at least is well worth recommending to media or journalism undergrads as a talking point.

Hal Roberts at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society has made a startling discovery:

Three of the circumvention tools — DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix — used most widely to get around China’s Great Firewall are tracking and selling the individual web browsing histories of their users.

(further details here)

Of course we all know that attention is unequally spread among bloggers - now it emerges that people’s blogs are being judged by the platform they choose to use to host them. In the interests of research I joined “PayPerPost” and I discovered that they have recently decided not to offer to pay people whose blogs are on certain services to post about products and services. The blog platforms in question are:

MySpace, Vox, Xanga, BraveJournal, LiveJournal, Yahoo360, and Blogsome

This decision was made based on the usability, navigability and overall quality that we have seen from blogs on these platforms.

Please understand that we do not mean to say that ALL blogs hosted on these platforms are bad blogs. However, the majority of these blogs are just not what the advertisers or our Marketplace are looking for at this time.

Of course some of these users will doubtless be delighted to find out that advertisers don’t think the people they speak to are worth marketing to or (more likely in the case of sites like LJ) that the norms expressed by users of these platforms are strongly anti-commercial.

A recent study found that “those wanting to find OA [open access] articles in these subjects [ecology, economics and sociology], for the moment at least should use the general search engines Google and Google Scholar first rather than OpenDOAR or OAIster.”

Fits my own impressions, though a search expert recently endorsed three others from a list of ten.

These three Google employees may be the world’s most powerful censors

The New York Times Magazine today featured Google’s Gatekeepers - a look at the small unaccountable team within Google who decide whether and to what extent they will comply with the wishes of governments around the world who wish to regulate its operations. Encouragingly, Andrew McLaughlin, global public-policy director, is a Berkman Fellow, which is about as good a place as I can imagine to start from if you want to appreciate Internet regulation issues.

More disturbingly, Nicole Wong describes her role as finding an approach which “will allow our products to move forward in a country” (which should come as no surprise - as a publicly-held company it is legally obliged to maximise its profits).

Technorati (a service which indexes weblog postings) has produced its latest and most elaborate report to date on bloggers. Notable by its absence is what was a prominent (and dubious) feature of earlier reports - a graph showing a steady rise in the number of blogs and bloggers. Instead they are satisfied to remark that there are “widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.” Well, mainstream in terms of numbers of people who have ever read a blog perhaps but blog writing is still very much the act of a small minority, at least in the US and UK, according to representative surveys - Pew found in May 08 just 5% of US online users posted to blogs on a given day and 12% had ever done so.

Technorati have commissioned a survey (see their methodology description) of random Technorati customers (already, one should note, a skewed sample since only a fairly engaged weblog user would be interested in the services Technorati uses). They had 1,290 responses from 66 countries but give no data on how many people were contacted, so lacking a response rate it’s hard to know how this might further skew their information.

This caveat aside, their survey does contain one piece of information that is new - at least to me - a picture of the mean and median income bloggers get from advertising. Well, they find that 46% of bloggers don’t have ads on their blogs. Of those remaining, it’s striking (if not surprising) that income is highly skewed. Among European bloggers for example, the mean income is $9,040 a year, while the median is just $200. Personally I am skeptical that the actual median income from blog ads is even that high but would be interested to learn if anyone had come up with more reliable figures.

You can find an assortment of papers delivered at Media, Communication and Humanity linked here (ordered by subject).