I am re-visiting my literature review for my blogging-related thesis and I would like to make sure I have not missed anything important. I have uploaded my weblog-related references to citeulike here. I am particularly interested in qualitative approaches to blogging - especially interview-based work and in the study of personal/journal weblogs - sometimes dubbed “lifelogs” (as opposed to the study of weblogging for political, marketing or educational purposes).

A search of my references finds just 11 works which involved interviews with bloggers - four of which seem to be different analyses of the same corpus of interview data (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).

So can anyone point me to important sources I have missed? All contributions will be tagged and added back to the citeulike database and acknowledged here.

PS comments are broken at the moment so please email suggestions to my gmail address - davidbrake.

This new report surveyed seventeen writers already working in digital media in the UK. It gives an interesting snapshot of the variety of options available for those wanting to be “new media writers” but notwithstanding the optimistic note it sounds, two messages stood out for me - it’s stimulating, but don’t give up your day job because there’s not a stable business model out there, and the money (such that there is) is still in ’selling the shovels’ (training/teaching and consultancy) rather than the actual doing.

The cover alone (below) is reason enough to feature the report!

While reading a New York Times article about voice recognition and speech synthesis I learned about a new audio and video search engine, Everyzing. While the search engine itself was interesting, I was struck by the fact that the first thing you find in searching for Everyzing and in visiting their website is not the search engine page itself, but a page about the company’s business. And it is not centred on the user - it’s centred on the content providers. Specifically, the company is touting its skills in search engine optimization of audio and video content. So even before it hits the mass market it is already planning to make money by helping deep-pocketed media companies to get their media found by searchers ahead of others who don’t have those resources.

I tend to think of search engine companies and search engine optimization companies as being enemies but this reminds me that the relationship is a lot more complex.

Google’s Book Search gets most of the press but Microsoft has also been active in the large-scale digitization of both in copyright and out of copyright books for their search engine. At least until recently. I hope Microsoft’s short-sighted decision to phase out their book digitization programme does not encourage Google to do likewise. We academics have also lost out - the same decision also put paid to Microsoft’s “Live Search Academic” engine which shadowed Google Scholar.

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Robin Hamman pointed me to some interesting research into global adoption of online “Social Media” by a PR firm, Universal McCann. On the good side, the research is longitudinal (this is the third wave of research, which started in 2006). It also covers Internet users in 29 countries - more breadth than most studies. But it also clearly needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

The methodology is not clear but it looks like people were recruited to fill out online surveys of their usage (how were they found? To what extent were they self-selected?). They also chose a rather special target group - people who use the internet every day or every other day and are between 16 and 54 years old - a group they call the “active Internet universe”.

Having selected this unusually “net savvy” group they then find, unsurprisingly, a higher rate of adoption of social media/web 2.0 applications than the phone and face to face interview-based surveys I am familiar with. For example, 25.3% of the McCann UK sample had (at some point) started their own weblog - this compares to the Oxford Internet Institute’s 2007 figure of 9% of Internet users having maintained their own weblog in the last year. And while it is interesting to know that 70.3% of the Chinese “active Internet universe” had started a blog at some point you have to bear in mind (as they themselves point out) that “emerging Internet markets tend to have a demographical profile that fits the early adopter” (on slide 22 you see that in China only 6.4% of all 16-54 year olds fit their “active Internet universe” profile).

Given the limitations of the data outlined, it is hard to justify the kind of sweeping statements that are then made about the significance of social media eg “Over time, all users increase the regularity of usage. Eventually everybody will be an active user, as they have been with television.” (slide 7) or “The blogosphere is now so large it is an accurate barometer of consumer opinion” (slide 33). But if you avoid the hype you may be able to find some info-nuggets…

I saw a new link labelled “share your story” under my name in Twitter. I thought “hmmm - is Twitter trying to get into the blogging arena with a space for longer-form entries or is it trying to set up a profile page for each user?” So I click on it and I find they want my age, gender and location and why I use Twitter. It’s a marketing survey! Not what I think of as “my story” - guess my interest in digital storytelling skews my perspective on such matters…

Ofcom (2008) “Social Networking: A Quantitative and Qualitative Research Report into Attitudes, Behaviours and Use”

As well as the new UK survey and qualitative information it provides, it contains a review of the literature on the social networking focused on potential harms co-authored by Sonia Livingstone and Andrea Milwood Hargrave with myself contributing. We would be interested to hear any reactions.

Alvi, I., et al. (2007) “Meeting Their Potential: The Role of Education and Technology in Overcoming Disadvantage and Disaffection in Young People” - the 125 page report is free to download from BECTA, which sponsored it - co-authors from Media@LSE include Sonia Livingstone, Ellen Helsper and myself. Comments would be welcome.

LJ provides one of the most flexible and powerful toolsets for protecting weblog users’ privacy available today. Unfortunately, I just discovered that only paid LJ accounts have the ability to change the privacy levels of several posts at once. Surely a tool mainly useful to help users protect their privacy when they miscalculate their exposure shouldn’t be made into an added-cost ‘extra’?

Respected researchers at the Crimes against Children Research Center have released an excellent new paper debunking myths about the use of the Internet to get underage sex. Much of the information contained in the press release and the paper has been published before but it bears repeating.

Most Internet-initiated sex crimes involve adult men who are open about their interest in sex. The offenders use instant messages, e-mail and chat rooms to meet and develop intimate relationships with their victims. In most of the cases, the victims are aware that they are talking online with adults.

A majority of the offenders are charged with crimes such as statutory rape, that involve non-forcible sexual activity with adolescent victims who are too young to consent to sexual intercourse with adults.

What is new (at least to me) is their assertion that:

adolescents’ use of popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook do not appear to increase their risk of being victimized by online predators. Rather, it is risky online interactions such as talking online about sex to unknown people that increases vulnerability

The paper is freely downloadable:
Online “Predators” and Their Victims: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Prevention and Treatment, by Janis Wolak, PhD, David Finkelhor, PhD and Kimberley J. Mitchell, PhD Crimes Against Children Center at the University of New Hampshire and Michelle L. Ybarra, PhD, Internet Solutions for Kids, Inc., in American Psychologist, Vol. 63, No.2 .

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.

A friend of mine, Robin Hamman who looks after the BBC’s blog trials recently brought to my attention this study of the expressed political views of BBC Facebook users which was put out by conservativehome - an independent right wing UK website - back in October and was picked up by the Daily Mail.

The study (whose figures I have updated here using the same Facebook ad tool that conservativehome used) showed that of the 11,040 BBC staff registered on the site, 1420 staff put themselves in the “liberal” or “very liberal” category, compared with just 120 who labelled themselves “conservative” or “very conservative”. 420 regard themselves as “moderate” (the rest did not specify their political views). This compares to roughly 160k liberals and 56k conservative Facebookers in London and 847k liberals vs 233k conservatives in Facebook across the UK. (For the curious - there are < 20 self-confessed liberals working for Fox News in the US on Facebook compared with 40 conservatives and an equal number of moderates).

Of course this is somewhat embarrassing for the BBC as it provides further ammunition for those who would accuse it of liberal bias. The sample is a self-selecting sample from a self-selecting sample however, therefore no more than suggestive - and of course it includes large numbers of staff not involved in politically-sensitive work.

I find it interesting to note that the information provided probably included a large number of people who specified that their profiles (including their political allegiances) should be private. The privacy does not, however, protect users from being aggregated in order to be sold to - it is Facebook's ad sales tool that enables anyone to 'mine' Facebook to find out the expressed interests, ages and - yes - political affiliations of its users, grouped by organization. As this example shows, even aggregate data can be harmful to an organization when made widely available.

I also note that it is possible to attempt to advertise to Facebook users as young as 13 - and the ad sales tool says nothing about relevant regulations.

The BBC has launched BBC Memoryshare
“A living archive of memories from 1900 to the present day.” They suggest that what is provided “may be used as a source of programme content for the BBC.”

Facebook recently introduced “Pages” as an alternative to “profiles” for brands, companies and other collective entities to use. This fills a gap but alas their implementation is problematic. Just as you can only be a “friend” of a person (via their profile) on Facebook, the only relationship you can have with a “page” is to be a “fan” of it. I might want to register that I use, am part of or am interested in a company or organization with a page but that doesn’t make me a “fan”.

I suspect that Facebook did this so that brands like Nike would not have to deal with millions of people saying they were “enemies of” the page. Hopefully the API will enable third parties to make this kind of thing possible.

It is also worth noting that while they have announced to everyone that companies will be making “pages”, they don’t mention in that context that any individual or organization, non-profit as well as profit-making can make pages (you have to look in their “help” under “business solutions” - tellingly - to find the link).

The past two days I spent at MIT’s CMS’s conference ‘The Future of Entertainment 2′ bringing together top notch mobile, internet and entertainment professionals (MTV Networks, Yahoo!, TBS) to discuss where the entertainment industry is headed.

Transmedia is a hot topic - the development of content that can be delivered on many mediums is being used by both television shows and advertisers. Henry Jenkins discussed interactive television not just as clicking a button to be taken into an interactive on-screen experience, but instead as any form of interaction with a television show in the physical world, e.g. CSI’s involvement in Second Life.

I was especially impressed with the mobile media panel: Marc Davis, Yahoo!, Bob Schukai, Turner Broadcasting, Alice Kim, MTV Networks, Anmol Madan, MIT Media Lab

Alice Kim:
- How do we get compensated?
- How do we stay relevant to our userbase, which is very forward looking?

Marc Davis:
- In the next few years, 4 billion people with cell phones and wireless connections to each other
- Realtime sharing of video from billions of geolocated phones live
Anmol Madan:
- Computation models on how people share things in media
- Ultimate goal is to make all phone interfaces socially aware

Bob Schukai:
- 90% of our research is outside the US.
- The US is behind on mobile and broadband. Way behind
- We can learn a lot from other geographies

Also, ran into some familiar faces such as Laurie Baird (Turner) who introduced me to great other Turner folks, Todd Cunningham (MTV) and Jing Wang (MIT). Ended up at GamBit which is MIT’s terrific new research initiative to conduct digital games research. Oh, and heard a lot of FCC bashing… we may want to look into that a bit more…
All in all 2 great days!

(You can find detailed session reports here)

According to this NY Times article about Twitter, “90 percent of users agree to have all their posts available to the public”. This is all the more baffling considering that twitter now allows any user to be alerted in real time about anyone who mentions any string publicly. Public blogging I can understand but isn’t microblogging about the kind of hour by hour minutiae that only your friends will be interested in?

David Brake

If I were to be really cool I would say that I was among the first to join Friendster but moved to Myspace fairly early on when most of my friends-in-bands were totally ‘in’ to it (and ‘I’m here to help’). I would also say that I was invited to Joost beta (because I like to download stuff). I would also say that I’ve been ripping & burning lots of music and films from p2p’s early hay days (you have to get real about what you can take with you on the road). And although I brushed elbows with some big name record companies on this topic it didn’t refrain me from, all lovey dovey, r&b-ing. I would also say that I flirted with AIM, MSN and Yahoo Messenger but when a deceased friend kept reappearing on AIM it was time to go. I forgot my password for MSN (and gosh, I get fairly upset about Microsoft’s passport thing, so MSN got abandoned very fast) and Yahoo meant a blast from the past who kept on sending offline messages (’next!’ as they say in sheaux biz). I would also say that from the mid-1990s I taught myself some basic programming mambo jumbo and toyed with the idea of becoming a digital architect. It turned out that I had a short attention span. Never got into the hang of BBS. Yes, I do remember BBS. As a matter of fact, I stem from that period, from before when terms like ‘being networked’ and ‘digital’ seemed to become the norm for a lot of us; I know that there was no internet and no email for instance (well, for the common peeps like me). I guess these statements date me so to speak.

John Palfrey’s blog post on the Berkman Center’s project on Digital Natives raises the question who are actually these so-called Digital Natives? In his and Urs Gasser’s upcoming book ‘Born Digital’ (Basic Books, 2008) they explore and address an emerging global culture of connectivity, communication and content. Where the world is the network and the people the content… Where multi presence no longer differentiates between analogue players and the digital world. Are we then all Digital Natives? No. Are we all Born Digital? Heck, I’m not and even if I were, there would be no guarantee that I would be a Digital Native.

So, this is a discussion we’re having at the Berkman. What are the attributes? Age, culture, economics, etc. All of them? Who do they represent? What is its place in our day-to-day activities? I guess the main claim explored is the idea that connectivity and communal activities seems to be defining how people will live and work in times to come (a claim I’m critically assessing but will write about in due course). What are the implications for privacy? Safety? IP? Information quality? etc. And looking at sites like Google and Facebook where platforms are provided for us to connect (and create) we should ask ourselves how commonality here is really governed… And what that actually means from both user- and firm-centric perspectives.

So to tell you the truth: I have pimped my ‘all-features’ cell phone (truth be told that we usually lead separate lives). I would also say that I love taking pictures so possess more cameras than one might consider healthy, so transgressed into the bits & bytes of it (oftentimes end up with tears in my eyes and my good ol’ camera with real film in my hands). Aw my gawd. I’m an old fart (thank you, David Weinberger ;-).

I don’t usually announce new blogs here but Ideas for Development is a new groupblog with a worthy goal and unusually high profile participants:

- Kemal Dervis, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme,
- Abdou Diouf, Secretary-General of La Francophonie,
- Donald Kaberuka, President of the African Development Bank,
- Pascal Lamy Director general of the World Trade Organization,
- Supachai Panitchpakdi, Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development,
- Jean-Michel Severino, Managing Director of the Agence Française de Développement,
- Josette Sheeran, Executive Director of the World Food Programme.

And guest contributions from several leading NGOs and academic instutitions.

To the best of my knowledge there hasn’t been a mainstream UK TV series about a personal weblogger until now. Does the first screen outing have to be for ‘Belle Du Jour‘ - on TV as The Secret Diary of a Call Girl?

David Brake

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