Research blogging do’s and don’ts

I’ve been thinking a bit what to publish about my research on my weblog, and went to search for other examples of research blogs to give me some guidelines.

I stumbled upon this website by Jill Walker who has written a valuable paper on blog usage and research together with Torill Mortensen. A very good read for anyone who is in doubt on what to blog and what not to. The following quote presents an interesting view:

“Blogs exist right on this border between what’s private and what’s public, and often we see that they disappear deep into the private sphere and reveal far too much information about the writer. When a blog is good, it contains a tension between the two spheres…”

The paper by Walker and Mortensen can be downloaded from the website, or directly from here: Jill Walker and Torill Mortensen, Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool (February 2002, PDF).

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Yahoo! Timecapsule: What would you like to say to the future?

Yahoo! launched a new subpage called Timecapsule at timecapsule.yahoo.com. Although not very popular in the Netherlands, a timecapsule can be put in the ground with some stuff you think are important to you at that time, you dig it up fifty years later and you can look back at all those memories.

Jonathan Harris, the man behind Yahoo! Timecapsule, thought this would be a great idea to try out on the web. And so we now have a digital timecapsule. Accessible to the whole world to put in their messages of Faith, Sorrow, Fun, Anger and lots more. In a personal note on the website, Harris states: “Yahoo! Time Capsule sets out to collect a portrait of the world – a single global image composed of millions of individual contributions. This time capsule is defined not by the few items a curator decides to include, but by the items submitted by every human on earth who wishes to participate.”

A few days after the start though, Michael Krumboltz from Yahoo! Timecapsule writes on the Encapsuled blog that the Anger category seemed to draw the most text submissions. Interesting stuff, because I think this Timecapsule is a reflection of a whole group of people (Yahoo! users). It’s even mass psychology maybe.

So what do we want others to think of us in 2020? Because that is when the Timecapsule will be opened, at Yahoo!’s 25th anniversary: “After 30 days, time capsule content will be saved onto a digital archive and sealed, to be opened at Yahoo! corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. on the company’s 25th anniversary in the year 2020. In addition, copies of this content will be presented to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings archives in Washington, DC to be preserved, studied and shared with future generations.”

Writely frustrations… and ideas

In the Masters of Media class we’ve been trying out Writely.com for a couple of assignments in the past weeks. Not so long ago the online word processor was acquired by Google. The idea is very promising: “Share documents instantly & collaborate in realtime.” So we decided to take it for a test-drive, but so far all attempts have failed to create one united, democratic post. Here is my view on why the Web 2.0 application falls short on the collaborative aspects, and causes more frustration than collaboration.

Two cases
First let me start by saying that our group with eight people might be larger than the average Writely collaboration. The first thing we tried to do was set up a few guidelines, or top ten rules, for cooperation on Writely. By using various colors we distinguished ourselves and things seemed to go fluently in the classroom. But when I got back home and got back to the Writely document I was hesitating if I could for example edit, or maybe delete text that was added to my entry. In short: I needed to discuss it instantly.

The second try also suffered from the above problem, but in kind of a different way. We’re now in the proces of -or at least trying to- creating a combined (blog)post on the infamous Shocklogs. There was some writing already in the document and I added some lines, but the main problem with this was that we couldn’t decide anyhing about the form of the document because -again- there was no way to discuss the subject directly. Of course you can use the document like a chatbox, but that messes up your whole layout and with more than two people you get quite a chaotic document.

What would be very useful is a small Writely chatbox so you can chat with your collaborators directly. An instant messaging option would make the program a lot better for use in bigger groups. Or why not a “you decide” button which let’s Writely juggle the text by itself, whatever gets the job done! This second solution might sound a bit over-the-top, but I could imagine an option that lets you put different colors of text together automatically. Or one document which could use a multitude of tabs, one for discussion and one for the actual document. Just some ideas.

Can it be that we are the problem? That we need a more organized approach? Maybe, but the lack of specific collaborative options makes it very hard to actually complete a document with a lot of people. And yes… I do know it’s beta…