The Persistent Conversation track started out this morning with Lilia's presentation.

Efimova, Lilia & de Moor, Aldo (2005). Beyond personal webpublishing: An exploratory study of conversational blogging practices. In Thirty-eighth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-38), Los Alamitos: IEEE Press.

Abstract: Although initially developed as low-threshold tools to publish on-line, weblogs increasingly appear to facilitate conversations. The objective of this study is to identify practices of conversational blogging. This paper presents results of an exploratory qualitative analysis of a weblog mediated conversation case, focusing on participation rhythm, media choices and specific linking practices. Based on our findings we propose attributes of conversational blogging: linking as conversational glue, tangential conversations and interplays between conversation with self and conversations with others. Finally, future research directions are discussed.

The paper will be available from the ACM archive at a future date. The paper was presented by Lilia Efimova.

Lilia polled the audience and most knew what blogs were. Several keep blogs.

Weblogs were designed as tools for personal publishing not as tools of conversation.

It's not the first time that people have used technologies to communicate where the tech was not originally designed for communication.

Average blog is not conversational (Herring et al 2004). When they are when, why, and how are they conversations?

Weblog conversation occur though links between blogs. Links are connections.

Conversation occurs through comments within the post, and trackback between blogs.

Definition of weblog conversations: Multiple weblog posts on a topic connected via links.

Conversations are distributed and fragmentary.

Links are uni-directional which limits the readers ability to pull together the conversational threads.

There is a lack of tracing technologies to pull together these threads.

Distinguishes between tools, practices, and artifacts.

Want to understand the practices of particular subcultures of blog users.
Culture specific tools.
Culture specific practices

Actionable sense conversations defined as knowledge management bloggers who are early adopters.

Results
The slides presented include several charts that are difficult to read on the overhead. Please check the paper for information.
Multiple media conversation
Skype
phone
email
SocialText Workspace (wiki)
Graph that shows links between blogs was displayed. See the paper for information.
A graph showing summaries between posts was displayed. See the paper for information.
A graph showing linking within the authors posts was displayed. See the paper for information.

Conversational blogging
Conversation with no shared space
Distributed over multiple blogs.
Links that glue it together
tangential conversations instead of a single one
Global conversations and local in comment to specific posts
Parallel discussion of subposts.
Conversation with self
Use of different media
Conversation with self net to conversations with others
Linking of ones own posts.
Choices between postings
Results
Hard to generalize
Other cases
Frequency scale of weblog conversations
Nature of weblog conversations
Tools for conversation tracking and visualization
Shaping research methods

Posted by prolurkr at January 6, 2005 11:06 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.professional-lurker.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/383