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Mark Bernstein
The Social Phsyics of New Weblog Technologies
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Why are Weblogs interesting to study
- millions of them
- written by amateurs spending time and money to create these things for us
They are hard to study because they are about people
We need to look at different aspects of what we are doing and think about the change it is bringing about
- history, statistics, ethnography, criticism, simulation, economics, lit theory, psychology etc
What weblogs want:
- to share info
- readers
- money
- friends
"writing for mother" - it is fine to produce weblogs that are read by only a few people.
Ten tips for writing - see his piece on A List Apart
Research: until now research tends to focus on trying to persuade the academy to take it seriously - why not try to do research that matters for weblogs themselves.
At the moment the field is small, so tool makers are linked to research and weblog users - technorati, etc., make this easier to track. Code is young and flexible and there are lots fo weblog writers linked to the toolsmiths.
Does blogging change writers? Does the discpiline make you a better writer? What does it do for professionals?
Take 18 students who signed up for a writing class - give half weblogs and half paper and then see who does best. Statistical significance unlikely; political pressure to account for age, gender, race, etc. Pointless exercise.
However, we can analyse existing weblogs that have been going for few years. We can apply literary theory to analyse these weblogs and look at the effect of update frequency, etc.
What is success for a weblog?
- it is not abandoned
- page rank
- influence
How would this knowledge change software?
Weblogs cost a lot to run in terms of the time investment required. Do they earn this money back without advertising? Well, book publishing continues despite the fact that the majority of people make very little money, but they get indirect compensation which makes it worthwhile.
How to make this all work:
- We need "salvage ethnogrpahy" to look at flame wars and the death of systems like usenet and slashdot. Otherwise we will only have archeology to fall back on. What makes mass online community media like USENET fail, and how can we avoid it with weblogs?
- Blogrolls and link patterns - how can they have the opposite effect from flame wars.
- Trackbacks and open comments are inspired but wrong. How do we avoid them killing weblogs?
- Fiction and Authenticity - what is it - how do we approach it? Will people travel and start love affairs just to produce content for their weblogs?
- Using our archives better: we must get more clever categories and archives to build value in weblogs.
Some interesting points...
1. I don't know what you mean about "Salvaging ethnography" to study weblogs. Are blogs already ethnography of a sort, only less tinged with the issues of deceitfulness. They are ethnography.
2. USENET failed but had 10 or so good years. Blogs will fail too (we have 6 left to learn anything useful)
3. Trackback sucks simply because the tools for working with it have been so so so poorly implemented.
4. Comments work. You get spam, you turn them off. You wait a bit, you turn them on again. It would be nice if we could notify a central server if a comment is spam and save everyone else from Teen Cams or Viagra comments, but till then... so what?
5. I like the idea of "Travelling and Starting Love Affairs Merely to Produce Content for their Weblogs". There are worse things to do with your spare time, trust me.
6. A simple XML format for categories (or networks of categories (topic maps?)) which were then linked to a Dublin Core search engine crawler via trackback would really be exciting, but only to fools like us (until it worked that is).