I can’t describe it better than Robin Hamman does:

The panel, chaired by Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the NUJ, includes:

Carol Hall, Rights Manager, BBC News
John Thompson, MD, Mousetrap Media
Kyle McRae, Scoopt.com
Fiona Brownsell, CEO, Youview
Eddie Gibb, Head of External Relations, DEMOS
Bill Hagerty, Editor, British Journalism Review
Vicky Taylor, Editor, Interactivity, BBC
Jemima Kiss, News Editor, journalism.co.uk
Simon Waldman, Guardian Unlimited

You can read and participate here

One of my supervisors, Dr. Nick Couldry is joining myself, Prof. Sonia Livingstone, and media researchers from across the world in a research network run by the University of Oslo’s Intermedia Lab - Mediated Stories: Mediation perspectives on digital storytelling among youth. My particular contribution (alongside Couldry) will be on Weblogs as Self-representation. I am very much looking forward to my involvement in the project and if you’re interested in young people, new media and education I encourage you to keep an eye on the site in the years to come as it develops.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and ‘99th Greatest Briton‘* who has just started blogging. As he points out in his first entry, he always wanted the web to be a fully read-write medium not just a publishing one, so weblogging is a natural extension of his vision.

Not surprisingly the comments tend to be one of "hey welcome", "thank you so much" and "can I talk to you about x?"…

* P.S. What kind of a world do we live in where Tim B-L is 99th and Eric Morecambe is 32nd?

Sue Thomas of the Writing and the Digital Life weblog brought my attention to a row that broke out a few days ago between Mena Trott (co-founder of a major weblog software developer) and Ben Metcalfe, leader of the BBC’s developer network. Mena was arguing that bloggers should be more civil in comments to other people’s blogs while Ben argued honesty was more important. This is an argument that will never be resolved because both sides seem to be trying to make rules applicable to all webloggers when all the evidence (including my research to date) seems to be showing that webloggers are performing a wide range of practices, each with their own appropriate norms and values.

Mena is arguably right that commenters should respect the norms of behaviour that appear to be present on a given weblog but Ben is right to suggest that in the subset of weblogs dedicated to rational critical discourse (a small subset of the whole), norms of politeness may be inappropriate and stifle debate. The real problem they are (unwittingly) identifying is not "how can we enforce or encourage a single norm of weblogging behaviour" but "how can webloggers signal what the ‘rules of engagement’ are for the spaces they create?" Perhaps bloggers could create "creative commons" style "licenses" around commonly-held behaviour norms?

P.S. In that case this blog might be labelled "comments encouraged, politeness not required, provision of evidence for opinions encouraged, statement of conflict of interest required where appropriate".

Over the past several months, Global Voices Online has emerged as the leading online portal and guide to international blogs beyond North America and Western Europe. It has also become the hub of a growing community of international bloggers who want to build a better global conversation.

The Global Voices Summit, on December 10th, will be an opportunity for contributors and community members to take stock of what we?ve done, promote our successes, and brainstorm about what a global citizens? media community might accomplish going forward.

Alas the physical meeting is already full but they will be encouraging online participation as well with video streaming and IRC.

I just stumbled across an interesting podcast from BusinessWeek - "The Blog Elite" wherein they interview leading bloggers and podcasters with a business bent. The first of these interviews was with Leo Laporte, a radio veteran who went to podcasting and started one of the most popular podcasts around - This Week in Tech.

He made a number of thought-provoking comments but what I found most intriguing is that he pointed out some differences between podcasting and blogging. Podcasting is not just blogging in sound instead of text. It is consumed differently (it can be listened to while doing other tasks so it doesn’t require your whole attention) and, he argues, while blogs are about the content, podcasts are to a much greater extent about the personality of the creators because what comes across in the voice is of greater importance. I realised that in my case it is certainly true - I listen to his radio show not so much because of what I learn there about technology but because (when it gels) I enjoy the laid-back, friendly back and forth between the participants as they talk about the tech news.

He also made some interesting (and to me worrying) comments about how because podcasts are a ‘grassroots’ medium they are seen as more authentic and that advertisers can exploit this authenticity to sell their products. Thankfully his personal view is that most podcasters will never make significant money at it so they shouldn’t try - they should instead do it for the love of it and to express and share whatever it is they wish to express.

Thanks to Antonio Roversi I just came across an interesting piece about Web 2.0 by Nicholas Carr which has attracted a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere (his piece is 2,500 words and the comments stretch for another 12,000 words - not counting 322 people so far who have discussed it on their own blogs). I won’t attempt to summarise it yet again but I encourage you to read it, though the author is occasionally as exaggerated in his "contrarian" rhetoric as the techno-utopians he criticises - eg:

Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it’s created by amateurs rather than professionals, it’s free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die.

I think he’s right to point out the dangers but this is a little too apocalyptic. That said, his conclusion is spot on:

Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral… it doesn’t care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let’s can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.

I consider my own research as an extension of this - one of my more ambitious objectives is to look dispassionately at personal weblogging and to ask:

Is personal blogging really a liberatory technology (as almost all the scholars studying it seem to maintain) or is it just a potentially liberatory tool. If it is beneficial, for whom is it and how? And given the negative consequences of its use, what can we say about the net effect on society?

I’m transcribing interviews with my London-based bloggers at the moment and no matter how many times it happens it still fills me with pleasure to hear the really interesting stuff come out as I listen effectively for the first time (during an interview itself I find I am only about 50% listening and 50% thinking about what to ask next or what I might have missed). But transcribing is also a gruelling discipline. I started transcribing one woman just now and was five minutes in thinking ’she’s interesting but she’s also speaking quite fast - I hope I won’t wear out before I finish’. Then I looked up at the audio track and saw that this interview is two hours long!

Most of them tend to be an hour to an hour and 20 minutes but that’s both the strength and the drawback to semi-structured interviewing. If you are getting good material you can keep it going but at some point you are going to end up having to transcribe and then analyse all that material which you tend to forget is much more time-consuming than the interview itself. This one interview will probably take me about eight solid hours just to transcribe (and since I can’t transcribe like that without copious breaks that probably means a few days’ work). Phew. Better get back to it…

If you are or have been a long-term resident of the US or of China, please visit this survey by a student at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. It “focuses on different uses of weblogs in mainland China and the United States and is a first step to investigating the increasing political influences of the weblogs in Chinese civic lives.”

It has been a little frustrating to spend days at AoIR6 meeting all kinds of interesting people but not being able to tell them much about my own research because I had not yet done any analysis.

Well, I spent a good year and a half narrowing down my question and theoretical framework (Stage I) and several months doing data collection (Stage II) - today I ‘officially’ start analysing my fieldwork (Stage III)! In this case, this means producing a rough coding frame for my 24 interviews (so far) with London-based personal webloggers.

Don’t get too impatient to see my results yet - I don’t expect to have produced anything for Stage IV (writing up) until next year but I feel like I’m moving along at last. This is certainly a different rate of progress than I had in journalism when a month seemed like forever to produce something - but of course I hope to dig a whole lot deeper in to my subject…

P.S. I was wondering why my posts about AoIR weren’t appearing in the AoIR6 feed - I had mis-written the tag. Oh well.

… is the headline result from a collection of seemingly random Internet-related factoids from a Guardian report of a UK poll.

Among those with a web connection at home, 31% [of 14 to 21 year olds] said that they had launched their own personal site or blog. Those aged 16 to 17 have taken most avidly to personal online publishing, with a female bias.

I hope the full results get published somewhere.

Might be interesting for others at AoIR6.

To my mind the scary PhD moment #1 has to be the moment when you think "my research doesn’t add up to anything". I think I am past that - but closely following behind it has to be what I am facing at the moment - "my research was going to show something really interesting… but I just read this article which covers the ground already."

Fortunately, in the social sciences rather than the hard sciences you are unlikely to get a situation where your research has been completely superseded by someone else’s findings, but one of the things that can keep you going through the PhD process is the feeling that you have found some aspect of your field that nobody else has spotted.

In my case, my qualitative examination of weblogging has in part been motivated by a desire to problematise the early essentialist conceptions of weblogging that suggested "weblogs are all…" X, Y or Z. Then I finally got around to reading some of the articles in my ‘to read’ list - particularly Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog - part of the excellent Into the Blogosphere collection - and Composing the Self: Of Diaries and Lifelogs, both written last year and both providing just the kind of nuanced treatment of blogging and its motivations that I had immodestly hoped to pioneer. Oh well - back to standing on the shoulders of giants and pushing the boundaries of knowledge forward a few inches at a time…

… was the provocative title of a session at the Blogher conference. I am delighted to see that the audio for that is now available. Also see a partial transcript of the session by one of the people attending.

Some notes off the top of my head - From 7:30 (and throughout) the panelists and those listening talk about what they perceive as the benefits of “identity blogging” (a new term for me). On the other hand at 22:26 I heard that the author of I, Asshole found the contents of her blog being used (unsuccessfully) against her in a child custody action on her divorce - a risk of personal weblogging I had not hitherto considered!

And lastly, a contribution at 38;00 from Amy Gahran who has a blog, Contentious and who says that in the coming weeks she is going to be adding a page to her professional site saying, “by the way, I am polyamorous” because as she puts it, “I want people to know I exist”.

I respect and admire her desire and willingness to reveal a stigmatised identity to help others with that identity (a common theme among those at that talk and a theme explored by McKenna and Bargh) but to put that information on her professional site? It’s hard for a repressed Brit to get his head around (and I know at least one of my friends is poly)…

Inna Kouper pointed me to a report by a left wing think tank claiming that there are now more readers of left than right wing weblogs. It is a pretty partisan report making some bold and not substantiated claims - for example that the right wing blogosphere is "nurtured by institutions and is part of the conservative,
right‐wing media machine" while the left wing blogosphere is "introducing new actors into the political scene".

The most interesting claim which they support with some survey evidence (though without giving enough methodological detail) is that "as of 2003, the conservative blogosphere was between two and three times as large as the progressive blogosphere, and held a commanding lead in terms of overall traffic", but "In less than two years the progressive blogosphere had grown from less than as big as the conservative blogosphere, to nearly
double its size" [in terms of traffic].

I find it hard to get too excited about the stats until I read some more detail about how the statistics were collected (particularly because the organization they say did much of the research, MyDD, is a Democrat politics blog not a market research organization). But if they were true it would be an interesting springboard for future research…

It’s an idea so obvious that it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been tried before - Open Source (from Public Radio International) puts together an hour-long daily show based on ideas for shows solicited from readers of their blog and includes online interaction from those readers throughout (and after) the show. The idea attracted some coverage in the New York Times but as yet they haven’t put anything out that I am interested in. Still, it’s early days yet…

“The phrase “It’s absolutely the same with me, I…” seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other’s thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy’s ear by force. Because all of man’s life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others.

Kundera, Milan and A. Asher (1996) The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Faber and Faber, London.

There’s something about blogging in that aphorism, I’m sure…

The insularity of American web publishers has long been a pet peeve of mine so the launch of the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers with accompanying American-style logo struck a sore nerve. It’s true that in their overview of common issues FAQ they point out that laws vary between countries but several of the sub-FAQs fail to make this point and some of them could therefore actually mislead the unwary. Like their guide to defamation law which says, “If the plaintiff is a public figure, he or she must also prove actual malice” - not true in the UK, for example, I believe. I think in Europe people also have more rights to privacy than here (eg I think you in theory have to get permission from people you take pictures of if you want to publish them though I am not sure about this).

Simply calling it the Legal Guide for American Bloggers would help a lot here, and if they encouraged other major blogging countries’ policy wonks to produce similar guides (and linked to them) that would help a lot too. Meanwhile, serious UK and European bloggers might want to look at The Legal and Regulatory Environment for Electronic Information by Charles Oppenheim which I picked up some time ago though it is now four years old (can anyone suggest anything more recent and/or cheaper?). Suggestions via comments of websites and other online resources relevant to other countries would be welcome.

Of course, I should add, the EFF’s publication of a guide like this is, on the whole, a Good Thing, they have produced lots of other good stuff both for Americans and for the wider Internet-using public and if you are in the US and a blogger (or just want to see how their law affects ordinary members of the American web publishing public) this guide is well worth reading. Also see their guide to How to Blog Anonymously…

The BBC at the beginning of this year provided some case studies of using blogs to teach in universities - several of them in the UK. It’s always good to hear about academics blogging on this side of the Atlantic - I often feel a little lonely doing this… Are there any other instances of good blogging practices readers have come across from elsewhere in the UK?

PostSecret

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It didn’t take long for people to look at the increasing number of resources for free online video publishing and figure out how to use them to produce their own video-based weblogs. The good news is that it can be done and (if you have the right equipment and a broadband connection) it won’t cost you anything. The bad news is that as the tutorial makes clear it still involves jumping through a lot of hoops to make it all work. Don’t expect to see any video blogging from me any time soon!

Still, it’s interesting and once it gets made easy (perhaps Vimeo will enable this?) it might be an important direction blogging goes in. I just hope it doesn’t encourage teen blogs to head further towards self-produced porn…

In related news, the Open Media Network recently launched. It is designed to provide an easy way for users to find and download video both amateur and professional online. It won’t help you do the initial publishing but it will help you if you want to distribute something. Unfortunately for me the initial software is Windows-only, though it will be available on Mac and Linux later.

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