blogging practices of knowledge workers
“Blogging helps to articulate and organise thoughts, to make contact with people interested in the same topics, to grow relations with other bloggers that often turn into a joint collaboration, to do research, or to work on a publication. When used in those ways blogging is beneficial for work and yet it is inherently personal, driven by the passions and investment of an individual, and difficult to formalise or control.”
“Archeology is about studying artefacts in order to say something about artefacts or practices…Ethnography would be an alternative: studying practices by living the “life of the tribe”…This research combines both the study of artefacts and of the practices behind them.”
“I treat my weblog as a reflexive journal (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) that documents research choices, personal experiences and emotions in the process of doing research.”
“Studying practices of other bloggers while being one myself puts me in the middle of two conflicting practices when representing them in my reports. In the blogging world, the rule is to attribute any quotes from other blogs, ideally linking to the original post, while in the research world the rule is to anonymise to protect privacy of the respondents.”
“In this work I look at a weblog as a personal knowledge base and take a somewhat narrow perspective on PIM activities, using as a starting point those proposed by Barreau (1995): acquisition of items to form a collection, organisation of items, maintenance of the collection and retrieval of items for reuse.”
“Capturing ideas in a trusted external repository makes one’s mind free to work on a task at hand, and it also creates an opportunity to notice connections and to generate more ideas (Allen, 2005, pp.16 and 72-74 respectively). From the perspective of this study, a weblog is viewed as such an external repository that might be useful as a parking space for ideas.”