Blog Hui 2006

Paper summary:

The development of blogs can be traced as far back as 1994 and the creation of the term weblog to 1997. However, while for pioneers of ‘logging the web’ the process of hand-coding pages with regular updates was of little consequence, for the majority, this was and remains to be a difficult and tiresome experience. Consequently, it was not until the development of hosted and streamlined blogging tools that that the popularity of blogging became more widespread. Indeed, this popularity in use has led blogging to become, for many industries, a key, educational, professional development and communicative activity.

In these contexts, however, the generic hosted blogging services offered by ‘blog providers’ such as Blogger, Live Journal and Typepad do not meet the requirements of most organisations. Universities want ultimate control over the content that might be published on student (and staff) sites, businesses want commercially-in-confidence information to be blogged securely on the intranet and most corporate and institutional users want greater degrees of customisability, control and flexibility than these services are able to offer. In this context there has been a surge in the development of open source and for-profit multi-user blogging tools which allow organisations to provide, develop and control the use of blogs as a business exercise.

This paper examines the development of these tools from a technical and practical perspective. It asks which elements of these tools have developed in importance over time, which have ceased to be used and which have been added. It explores current and future possible applications of these tools in light of existing and developing functionality and asks what the future holds for the uses of organisational and institutional blogs and blogging in education, communication and business.

Presenter profile:
James Farmer is a social architect with a particular interest in the development and use of web 2.0 technologies. He’s the founder of the edublogs.org group of sites, runs the web consultancy business Blogsavvy and works in the public and private sectors looking at how technologies can shape the way organisations and individuals communicate. He’s also got a sideline in events management having co-organised the 2005 conference Blogtalk Downunder and being the founder of The Edublog awards. When not involved in running all of this under the incsub flag, he keeps the blog Incorporated Subversion, spends a fair bit of time wandering up and down Melbourne’s Yarra river and will quite happily bore you death on the subjects of football (the real version) and poker, but beat you at neither.

Paper summary:
How do we get teaching staff interested in using blogs for learning and teaching? Do professional development workshops actually make a difference?

This paper will present the findings to date of a one year study following three groups of participants who attended introductory workshops on blogging. The aim of the study is to follow up with the participants a three monthly intervals for one year following their attendance at the workshop. Are they or their students blogging after one year?

Presenter profile:

Carol Cooper and Peter Gossman work in Teaching and Learning Services at Lincoln University.

Carol has been using technologies in teaching for over two decades and has recently become interested in blogging in the last two years. She writes regularly in her own blog carol-cooper.blogspot.com and runs workshops to encourage others to explore blogging possibilities with students. She was an Edublog 2005 nominee.

Peter is a relative newcomer to interactive educational technology but has a background in teaching and teacher training and an interest in educational research.

Paper summary:
A presentation in two parts. The first argues that most blogging fits into a definition of play conceived as activity in a ‘flow channel’ described by Csikszentmihalyi in ‘Flow: the Psychology of Happiness’. In short, blogging makes bloggers happy and, as such, is an essentially playful activity. Part two then looks at the Baghdad blogger, Salam Pax, and at recent blogging in China, and asks what happens to the blogging ‘flow channel’ when things get serious, and whether these examples are a break from playful blogging or in fact an extension of the same principles.

Presenter profile: Professor Dan Fleming

Dan is interested in the relationships that interconnect popular culture, critical pedagogy, social realities and communication technologies and in how the creative industries relate to these. The author of the books Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture (1996) and Media Teaching (1993) and editor of Formations: a 21st Century Media Studies Textbook (2000), Dan has lectured in Scotland and Northern Ireland, worked in community video, was a visiting research fellow in British Telecom’s video-on-demand trials, has held a visiting lectureship in new media at a Brazilian university, was one of the founding faculty in the Centre for Media Research in Northern Ireland and helped launch Northern Ireland’s pioneering industry-approved Masters degree in Film and Television Management and Policy. The recipient of a Distinguished Teaching award from the University of Ulster, he was subject leader there for Media Studies, Media Arts and Journalism before coming to Waikato in 2005. An Ulster Scot, Dan is keenly interested in questions of cultural identity and centre-periphery relations. Among several research grants, he was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowship in 2001 to investigate visual constructions of identity in the ‘Last Best West’, the Canadian prairie in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is exploring ways of using multimedia to present work of this kind.

Unfortunately, work demands has meant Brad will be unable to present at Blog Hui. Brad and Team Blog Hui are disappointed by this unexpected turn of events.

Paper summary:
As blogging moves increasingly into the business domain, its potential use for communication and collaboration within an organisation is now becoming apparent. IBM has embraced blogging wholeheartedly and this paper examines the following aspects of this initiative:

• Genesis: How did blogging get onto the agenda at one of the world’s largest organisations? Who were the instigators and how did they gain executive support?
• How: What does IBM’s blogging program look like? What tools and guidelines have been provided, and how effective have they been?
• Examples: Who is blogging in IBM? What are they talking about, and has it been well received?
• Results: Has the program been a success? If so, in what respect? What (if any) conclusions have we been able to derive so far?
• Future Directions: What’s in store for the IBM bloggers? How does this align with supporting programs around Wikis and Podcasting?

Finally, this paper will attempt to draw conclusions from IBM’s overall experience and map those to the needs of enterprises (of all sizes) in general. As an early adopter of enterprise blogging, IBM’s experience can act as a microcosm of the entire social networking movement.

Presenter profile:
Brad Kasell is the Asia-Pacific Manager for IBM Software Group’s Emerging Technologies division. Brad’s primary responsibility is helping customers get started with Rich Internet Applications, Open Source, and Social Networking, as well as various other technologies such as Autonomic Computing that are related to IBM’s On Demand software strategy.

Brad has recently re-joined IBM after spending six years working in a consulting capacity for PricewaterhouseCoopers and Excite@Home in the United States. During a prior tenure with IBM Australia Brad worked as a Senior Software Engineer and Project Manager on a variety of application development projects. Brad’s industry experience includes retail (apparel), telecommunications, pharmaceutical, utilities (electricity), insurance, and interactive marketing/advertising.

Brad holds a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering (Honours) and a Master of Business Administration (International Business), with both degrees from the University of Technology, Sydney.

Paper summary:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has a variety of library uses. Feeds are available from a variety of electronic databases including Pubmed and Proquest. Book reviews can be obtained from Amazon.com. Journal feeds provide tables of contents, while newspapers feeds link back to full text articles. Both Radio New Zealand and the New Zealand Herald provide feeds. The New Zealand Government also has a feed. Libraries can collate such feeds into a reference list for users to subscribe to, or incorporate the information from the feeds directly into web pages. Libraries also generate their own feeds and provide users with announcements about things as library hours or new resources. How, then, in 2006 are New Zealand libraries using RSS?

To gain an overview of usage, libraries using RSS were identified via a google search. A content analysis technique was then used to identify the number and type of libraries using RSS, the purposes for which the feeds were used and their content. Few libraries were found to be using RSS, but the research has established a baseline for practice which can be used to in future years to see if RSS, as an information tool, has evolved into a core feature of library websites.

Presenter profile:
Ailsa Parker

Web genres are an area that I am keen on researching, particularly in relation to libraries and their websites. This interest was initially prompted by proposed changes to our website at Whitireia Community Polytechnic and now I am always on the lookout for emerging genres, such as blogs and RSS feeds. In a library, the latter seem to offer alternative ways to communicate with our users, so I started looking at other library sites and this led to the topic of my paper. In addition, I have also set up a trial blog and some RSS feeds on the library website at Whitireia, where I work as Deputy Library Manager.

Paper summary:
This paper reports on a small-scale ethnographic study of the practices of contemporary bloggers, in relation to two New Zealand blogs. The goal of this research is to elucidate the ways in which people consume blogs in their everyday lives and how they make sense of their experiences, a largely overlooked area of research concerning blogs. I did this by interviewing twenty-three people, predominantly via computer-mediated-communication (CMC), about their individual blogging practices.

The two case-study blogs, Kiwiblog and Hardnews comment on news and politics and were chosen because they offered a richer scope of discursive blogging compared to other, less topical or well-known, New Zealand blogs. It is relevant to note that these are current-events based blogs rather than the personal, journal-style blogs, which proliferate in the blogosphere and as such my findings pertain predominantly to blogging practices surrounding current-events blogs.

As a global phenomenon allowing millions of people access to distinct forms of self-expression and interaction online, it is important to attend to such straightforward questions as why people blog, and what the significance of blogging is. What prompts people to use these electronic discussion spaces, and what do they get out of it? Why do they invest significant portions of their time and energy in online communication spaces? By exploring the modes of operation within the blogosphere, we can begin to understand the power that lies in what we make of the tools given to us in this unique electronic medium.

Presenter profile:
Amie Mills

After stumbling across the blogosphere quite by accident in 2004 I became utterly fascinated by it, more than a little consumed by it and devoted my last year at university to a research project on the consumption of New Zealand blogs.

I had completed a Bachelor of Arts Degree in History and Media Studies, twisting essay topics whenever I could to explore concepts of blogging and yet I didn’t feel that I had got blogs out of my academic system. In 2005 I conducted a small-scale ethnographic study of the practices of contemporary bloggers in relation to two New Zealand blogs.

I am still captivated by the blogosphere and the shifting, fluid nature of communication online. I think it is important to address the straightforward questions as to why people blog, and what the significance of blogging is. Why do people invest significant portions of their time and energy into blogging and what do they get out of it?

Paper summary:
Archiving and preservation of the web is an area that is currently at the forefront of agendas for many cultural heritage institutions throughout the world. The National Library of New Zealand has been undertaking web archiving since 1999. Changes to the National Library of New Zealand Act in 2003 has extended the mandate of legal deposit to also include electronic publications and that of the Alexander Turnbull Library to collect, preserve and make accessible digital material for heritage and research purposes.

Last year, the Turnbull Library harvested websites and blogs during the 2005 election. This paper will focus on the selection and harvesting process of the blogs, and the subsequent appraisal that took place. It will highlight how blogs have become a powerful political tool, how the library recognises their unique place among various kinds of electronic publications and the ways in which they will attempt to be retained and made accessible. It will also highlight the importance and responsibility that lies with cultural heritage institutions to ensure that new forms of information are preserved and made accessible for future generations, to provide an accurate representation of culture and history.

Presenter profile:
Vanita Lala is an E-Publications Selector at the National Library of New Zealand. Having completed a Masters in Library and Information Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, she has worked in various library and information management roles, primarily within the public service, before joining the Turnbull Library in this newly created role. At the Turnbull she is working in the area of web archiving and is part of the team working towards “collecting, preserving and making accessible digital material for heritage and research purposes”. She is also involved in blogging within the music community in Wellington – niceup.blogspot.com.