I am discussing different motives for starting and continuing blogging. Some are what I call ‘intrinsic’ - ‘I like writing, blogging is writing, therefore I blog’. Some are ‘extrinsic’ - ‘I blog because I want to raise my profile and improve sales of my book’. But there are some that are harder to fit. Like habit - ‘I blog now because it’s something I have gotten used to doing every day’. Or ‘I got started blogging because I read about it in a newspaper article and it seemed interesting’. Or ‘I had to have a blog to read my friends’ comments and once the space was there I couldn’t resist filling it.’ Is there a good way of grouping these alongside my other categories?

I have a very similar problem with the way that I look at what my sample of bloggers expect of their readers. Some are blogging to specific readers - eg friends and family (they don’t much care what they get back from them). I have called these monological blogs. Some are in a dialogue with readers they feel they know (dialogical), and some to or with readers they don’t really know (”telelogic” - because this is the kind of communication that CMC particularly enables.

So far so good - but what about those who blog and who like the idea of having an audience but aren’t thinking of anyone in particular as readers and don’t particularly need to hear back - eg “I blog because I like to write”? Or - in the extreme case - people who blog but though their blogs are open to the world they think of them as only for themselves? So far I am calling these “a-communicative” uses but that term doesn’t seem quite right to me.

My instinct is that there is a single term that spans these two cases, but I would be interested in hearing suggestions for terms for either case or both.

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I just know there must be something out there in the HCI literature on how computer users are influenced by things like the size and position of buttons, or (of specific interest to me) by the size of text entry boxes. If you have a text entry box 6 lines long on a page and an otherwise identical page but with a 12 line long text entry box wouldn’t you expect the person writing in the bigger box to write more? (Even though in both cases the writer can in principle write as long as they like, with the text box developing scroll bars if they reach the end of the box)? I know that there is an interesting literature on the effect of defaults - I am hoping there is some similar research on this topic.

If you happen to know of evidence for this (or someone else at least asserting the same) either in the academic literature (preferably) or in the practitioner literature please comment…

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I presume there is literature out there taking a phenomenological view of what using a computer feels like but I am not sure where to start looking. I hope to use it to buttress a hunch I have about why people seem to have trouble in managing public vs private space online. My feeling is that it’s because typing stuff into a computer just doesn’t feel like you’re addressing a large crowd at that moment - it feels like you are talking to yourself (unless you are addressing it to particular named other people who you can then visualise). One can make a similar point about the long life of blog postings. They feel conversational, not like having something published and indexed.

Anyway the only relevant reference I have been able to dredge up from my memory and Endnote database so far is this

Le cahier est inerte, plat, il appartient a la nature inanimee, c’est un fantome de lettre, un ersatz de livre. L’ordinateur a plus de relief et de personnalite, c’est un organisme vivant qui s’allume et s’eteint, vous joue des tours, vous surveille… (LeJeune 2000, p. 20)

(Roughly translated: A notebook is inert, flat and inanimate… The computer has more personality. It is an organism which starts and closes down… and which looks at you.)

Lejeune, P. (2000) “Cher ecran– ” : Journal Personnel, Ordinateur, Internet, Editions du Seuil, Paris.

Can anyone out there point me to some relevant papers or books about this?

David Brake

If you are writing with a word count in mind you should know about something which I just discovered - the word count in Word seems to consistently count more words in your document when it has field codes in than when you strip them out. I just tested this on a document which (according to Word) contained 7179 words before field codes were stripped, 6,473 without (the document had 690 words of bibliography in it). I assume that the latter figure is the correct one. (Note: I am using Endnote 10 on a Mac with Office 2004 - different versions of either application might give different results). It’s worth checking with your own documents before sending them to an editor!

David Brake

I know it raises familiar awkward questions about Google’s market power but in this instance I have to agree. Google’s ban on advertising for essay writing services joins its existing bans on ads for “weapons, prostitution, drugs, tobacco, fake documents and miracle cures.”

Having just about finished a literature review for a report on ICT and disadvantage (I’ll provide a link when it becomes available) can I plead with other authors to be specific in their abstracts? Here’s a (suitably anonymised) example of how not to do it…

“… The study investigates the links between [X, Y, and Z] and reveals the changing situation experienced by [people].”

OK so what was the nature of the links?! How has the situation changed? I know an abstract is necessarily of limited length and it can be hard to summarise months of research in a few sentences but abstracts are is meant to enable the reader to quickly get a sense of whether the paper or report itself will be of use. With abstracts like these the reader has no choice but to read the whole thing or discard it.

PS To make matters worse the report in question was divided into sections but the version I downloaded didn’t come with a table of contents or endnotes!

David Brake

So far there are just four public lectures available (most on foreign affairs) but more are promised. See this page about podcasts.

PS While on the subject of podcasting I recently came across an extensive podcast archive of audio and video lectures from Indiana University’s School of Library and Information Science.

I have been thinking about a methodological issue - online interviewing vs face to face. One issue is simply the likely amount of data one can reasonably get from an interviewee in a given time. If the average Internet user’s typing speed is 30-40 words per minute (based entirely arbitrarily on what Microsoft seems to think an “average user” might achieve) while the average speed of normal speech is 280 word per minute (again only rather loosely sourced) then given the same time commitment from your interviewee you’ll only get about 15% as much typed info as you would get face to face. Of course there are a lot of other variables in there to help you decide what method to use but I would still be interested to know if anyone can provide proper citeable estimates of typical typing and speaking speeds to use as rules of thumb. It strikes me that differential typing speed might be an under-measured index of the digital divide as well…

David Brake