Category: Weblog Theory

Here is a paper (PDF) by Bonnie Nardi, Diane Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht and Luke Swartz about motivations for weblogging: We discovered five major motivations for blogging: documenting the author’s life, providing commentary and opinions, expressing deeply felt emotions, working out ideas through writing, and forming and maintaining communities or forums. These motivations are by no…

Will Richardson has done a very good job tracking the discussion about student blogging.

Will Richardson of Weblogg-ed.com has collected the most recent posts from different locations about the “weblog in education” discussion: A number of threads about the value of blogging in the classroom have been floating here and there lately, many of them here. For context, some of the more relevant posts are Reading and Blogging here…

Ton Zylstra has photographed all the creative outputs of the BlogWalk sessions from 19th March 2004. There is a lot of ideas to consider.

An unidentifyable blog author explains the value of knowledge sharing: If you have ever taught, then you already know that teaching is certainly the most effective way to master knowledge.When I was a young software developer, I also did some training in C++ language and object-oriented programming. Although I knew enough about C++ to do…

James Farmer discusses once again the benefits of weblogging in education. He concludes: … in a setting where expression, collaboration, peer support, successful class dynamics, risk taking, sharing and all these recognized characteristics of effective learning are fostered, then personal publishing allows for a revolutionary form of expression and exploration between learners in the same…

In an article in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Anita Blanchard, Assistant Professor of organizational psychology at the University of North Carolina, shows how Behavior setting theories can be applied to describe interaction within online communities. [via Emerging Communications]

Jay Cross compares two blogging styles: journal and reference book. He suggests to further develop the weblog practice (and suggests his own blog as an practice example): The structure of most blogs accommodates their writers more than their readers. It’s time for bloggers to share their goals with their readers. Those goals should inform the…

This is an interesting article about presence. A number of emerging technologies including virtual reality, simulation rides, video conferencing, home theater, and high definition television are designed to provide media users with an illusion that a mediated experience is not mediated, a perception defined here as presence. Traditional media such as the telephone, radio, television,…

Jeff Ward is asking if weblogs are publishing or actually some kind of converstation. He is pointing to Lilia Efimova who is warning about potential degradation of communication by superficial reading & writing (or listening & replying). “I cannot adopt the concept that “conversation” alone is a good reason to invest this much time in…

Technorati has a new interface – is it really new or did I miss the change? Unfortunatly it seems the database was recreated. All the references to my weblogs are lost.

As Sebastian Fiedler has announced, our joined proposal has been accepted for EdMedia 2004.

“I tried to connect together bits and pieces from my reading and thinking about knowledge work for the paper I’m writing. Comments are welcome.See also: earlier thinking about this model in Knowledge worker spaces and other posts on knowledge networker.” [Lilia Efimova (mathemagenic)]

M C Morgan about weblogs and wikis: “Blogs and wikis, because they are different spaces, manifest/take advantage of/engage different epistemic and rhetorical possibilities and serve different rhetorical and epistemic ends. They engage different rhetorics: one topical, carved from the inside out; the other chronological, staying on top of things.[…]However, posting on a blog is easier…

“The most complete exploration of blogs in corporate environments I’ve seen: Blogging the Market: “How Weblogs are turning corporate machines into real conversations…But it’s not simply that organisations have forgotten how to speak and listen to their customers. They are afraid of doing so. They are petrified of letting go.” Works in every browser except…

Jason Fried from 37signals: “All the buzz about weblogs is really about one thing: Making publishing to the web as easy as writing an email. A blog is a web page, or a portion of a web page, usually made up of short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically (usually reverse chronologically). The posts…