Lilia Efimova is running a wonderful series on some research she conducted as part of her doctoral studies at Telematica Instituut, Netherlands. Here is the overview of her blog networking study. As Lilia points out other distribution channels will take much longer to get the work out so it is great to see preliminary results in draft form on her blog. I wish had these channels when I was a student but my doctorate was done before personal computers, much less blogs. The posts consist of notes from a series on interviews with bloggers, many of whom are likely well know to readers of this blog and appear on my blog list.
The running commentary makes great reading as Lilia has woven the response together well to tell a coherent story. Here is the part of the summary of the “getting to know others from a distance” section. “In sum, blogging provides a “living portrait” that not only shows ideas and interests of a blogger, but also helps to get to know her as a person, by observing writing, linking and interaction over time…learning about other bloggers from a distance provides an opportunity to make informed choices about possible closer contact with them, knowledge of their interests and personalities, as well as enough starting points for an interaction.” I could not agree more. You get to know the whole person, should they choose to reveal it. I get as excited writing about non-work things that I reserve for the weekends, as the work stuff. Sometimes the excitement is even greater for interests outside work, especially when it leads to meeting new people.
A subsequent section was “bonding through interaction.” Lilia summarized this section as follows. “While first interactions between bloggers often happen via weblogs, as relations between bloggers grow they engage with each other via multiple channels. In that respect conversations created by linking between weblogs play a special role: those “fragmented frequent conversations” support both collective development of ideas and strengthening the bonds between bloggers. Over time meeting in person and other channels are added to the mix to continue blogging conversations, to interact in more private and secure settings and to get to know others better. Over time those interactions create a foundation that might enable bloggers to collaborate to get things done together.”
In both of these sections, bloggers made reference to this blogger. In bonding through interaction, Luis Suarez talks about meeting me for the first time, while we had known each via blogging for several years: “It was amazing. [...] It was like two old pals talking about KM and picking it up where we have left it in the blogs.” Euan Semple gave similar example: “First time I met Doc [Searls] there were hugs and smiles and really energetic enthusiastic conversation in a restaurant. And we said at that time that others in the restaurant had known that we’ve never met each other they would think we were mad.”
I remember well meeting Luis for the first time at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this summer. The captured the feeling on my end and I wrote about it several times and included a picture that I found on Flickr taken at the conference that showed our meeting - see Luis Suarez Frees Himself From E-Mail’s Grip and Much More - where I wrote how “I finally met my long time virtual friend, Luis Suarez at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston in June.” I met a number of long time virtual friends at that conference, as well as elsewhere, and we had a good basis for furthering our conversations. This is one of the joys of blogging. I have met people from as far away form the US as India (Dina Mehta) who have common interests. Then I have eventually met the blogger in person as I did with Dina. I like the way Euan described his experience with Doc Searls. There is indeed real joy in these encounters that is much stronger, I feel, than with virtual relationships started with other means such as email or the phone.
I look forward reading more of Lilia’s work. There are many other sections.
Excellent post! this case study gives me a lot of things to think about. I think this would be nice and helpful to others. Thanks for the post.
Posted by: Chinese Executive Training | June 04, 2009 at 04:21 AM