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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…

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.

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.”

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

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

Just wanted to take the opportunity to highlight two very useful resources danah boyd has recently brought to my attention via her blog.

First is a presentation (available in audio and video though not alas transcribed) by her and three other US leaders in the study of online risks for young people - David Finkelhor, Michele Ybara and Amanda Lenhart. I was surprised as she was about how much their conclusions (particularly those of Finkelhor and Ybara) seem to have been misrepresented by the media. They do an excellent job of separating the hype about online dangers from the realities and the remedies they suggest for educators and for parents (and their criticisms of current thinking) seem to me very well thought through and argued.

danah mentioned an idea which I hadn’t seen promoted before - “digital street outreach” - the idea that peers online would intervene when they see behaviour or profiles that suggest the author is having trouble. I had thought the Cyber Angels might be doing this kind of work but it seems their focus is now on schools and parents not on the troubled kids themselves.

On a similar theme, but with more qualitative detail, I recommend a paper of danah’s she recently published online both as text and as audio - “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?”. It was very broad-ranging and gives an excellent introduction to some of the issues around young people’s use of social networking software.

The excellent academic group weblog Crooked Timber has produced a kind of online seminar via their weblog about Yochai Benkler’s recent book The Wealth of Networks which has attracted much attention in the blogosphere and contends that the Internet has enabled a new model for producing public goods which is under threat from corporations and governments.

The seminar happened back in May ‘06 so you won’t be able to join the discussion there any more but the archives are still available and worth reading. And if you want to comment further Benkler’s book is - appropriately - online and in wiki form.

David Brake

If you’ve been wondering what the man who popularised the term virtual community has been thinking about these days you should check out this post he wrote on the Annenberg Centre’s DIY Media blog. It outlines the potential importance of digital literacy for enabling political engagement. Well worth a look as is the weblog as a whole.

According to a new report by Ofcom, Britain’s communications regulatory authority (reported on the BBC News site) a staggering 70% of 16-24 year olds online (compared to 41% of the general population) have used some kind of social networking site, such as My Space, and one in five have their own website or blog.

The interesting bits are from page 68 of the telecoms section PDF (p 172 of the report). For example:

41% of UK adults with internet at home say they have used social network sites, with around half of those doing so on a weekly basis . Nearly one third use them for discussing hobbies and interests, and a further 26% discuss work-related topics online. Fewer internet users take advantage of websites for discussing personal issues (17%) or meeting new people (15%).

There has been a recent report by the excellent Pew Internet and American Life project on bloggers in the US as well that I imagine many of you have heard of but because they measure things differently (eg treating social networking software as a kind of blog for statistical purposes) it is hard to directly compare them with the results of this survey. Both the UK and US have some way to go in matching S Korea in blogging, however. Last year according to the Korean Ministry of Information and Communication more than half of all of S Koreans in their 20s had a blog (that’s in part because more than 95% of S Koreans that age were online).

Pew makes their raw data available a few months after the reports they produce emerge and I understand it is possible that Ofcom will do the same so if you are a researcher it may be worth visiting their research page from time to time to see if it turns up…

David Brake

I’ve been listening to this podcast of a conference presentation by Anil Dash at MeshForum 2006 where he (one of the earliest weblog developers) makes a number of interesting statements including this snippet relevant to my upcoming thesis about personal weblogging, 4 minutes, 57 seconds in to his talk:

You have to know who the audience is that you care about. One of the assumptions that a lot of us that have been in technology make is that if we just let them everybody would want to talk to 100 people around the world and tell them how they feel. That’s actually not true and for most people they consider those of us that do that to be somewhere between strange and psychopathic.

Now how would you cite that? At the moment I guess that it should be treated as a conference proceeding:

Dash, A. (2005) “Scale Social Networks and Livejournal.Com “. in MeshForum, San Francisco, California,May 7, IT Conversations. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1069.html

But that doesn’t tell you it is a podcast and crucially it doesn’t tell you that the part you want to hear is around 5 minutes in. This useful guide to Harvard citation says BS:5605:1990 (whatever that is) doesn’t include recommendations for electronic sources. Is there an advanced Harvard Style Lab somewhere coming up with standards for this stuff? What would you do? Should I just make up my own style?

David Brake

I have just been listening to NPR’s Technology podcasts and their coverage of the furore about strangers molesting children they first met through MySpace. I have some sympathy with the view that not enough had been done by the company to ensure the safety of children but some of the comments by those who are concerned make me worried as well.

Take for example the comments of Carl Berry, the attorney for a girl suing MySpace for letting an adult contact her “If they want to chat with each other that’s fine but I don’t see the social benefit of allowing children to talk to complete adult strangers online”, or those of Representative Diana DeGette (D) who told NPR, “we used to say to our children if a man comes up to you in the park or in the shopping mall don’t talk to them, run away. Now we have to translate that to the digital era.”

Are Americans really so terrified of each other? Fairly recent (2000) US research indicates only 7.5% of sexual assaults on children and adolescents were perpetrated by strangers (and quite a high proportion of assaults on teenagers are perpetrated by other teens, not predatory adults). The tens of thousands of ’stranger on pre-teen’ assaults in the US each year are terrible crimes but by far the majority of children will never face this danger. Is it worth creating a climate of pervasive fear and limiting childrens’ freedom to explore (and yes, even to make mistakes) in an attempt to tackle this? Just as adults’ civil liberties can be endangered in the ‘War on Terror’, those of children can be imperilled in the ‘War on Perverts’. And children arguably have even less of a chance to put their point of view than accused terrorists.
(Also see earlier posts Big Mother is Watching and The Death of Privacy).

David Brake

TakeAway - ‘the Festival of do it yourself Media’ is on in W London. This sounds like a great idea and I hope events like this one take off across the country. So much of government policy about the digital divide is about enabling people to consume Internet media - little effort seems to be going into helping people produce their own. My only concern is that the programme does look a little ‘art world’ inward-looking. I wonder whether it will manage to reach out to people not already integrated in the art and techie communities…

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.

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.

Yes I am unable to resist posting on yet another weblog - Writing and the Digital Life - a group blog this time “about the impact of digital technologies upon writing and lived experience”. Please look at the post linked above and if you can help answer the question it poses please make some suggestions.

To save you the click what I am trying to find is if there is any literature about the social or psychological significance of being able to express the creative urge (or not being able to). Not as a means to an end (group membership, education, counter-hegemony) but as an end in itself.

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)…

“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…

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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