Shamelessly stolen from BROG: The (We)blog Research on Genre project where it was posted by Susan Herring:

Just over two years ago (February 12, 2003, to be precise) the BROG project met for the first time. Its original members were Sabrina Bonus, Lois Scheidt, Elijah Wright, and myself. Inspired by Diane Squire, who was into blogs before most people in SLIS had heard of them, we got together to do one simple study -- a content analysis of random blogs, in order to characterize the emergent weblog genre. (See Diane's article about it in SLIS News from Spring 2003 -- Yes that IS a frog -- photoshopped -- on Lois's shoulder.) It was low-hanging fruit at a time when almost no serious scholarship on blogs existed. Since then, blog scholarship -- and blogging -- have expanded. And we've acquired a taste for the fruit, and are willing to climb higher to find it -- to the point of hand-coding nearly 6000 blogs for a link analysis study last year, just to be able to characterize with confidence one small corner of the blogosphere. Two years later, the BROG project lives on, an informal but durable collaboration with more research ideas than we have the time and resources to develop, even with our present expanded membership. Who would have thought we'd still be at it? :-)

It has been a wild, wonderful ride that I plan to hang on to till it ends. In the last two years I have learned a vast amount about research, academic friendships, blogs, and sushi...not necessarily in that order.

Along the way we have published papers we are incredibly proud of, incited a bit of controversy over the methods of our research (quantitative vs. qualitative debate), gotten to travel to conferences (Toronto, Kona HI @ 2, LA), and had far more fun then anyone would have thought possible for a bunch of grad students hanging out with top-drawer professors.

Mostly those that join us stay. Sabrina Bonus had the bad taste to graduate, get a job, and start to assume a more "normal" middle class life...we wish her well out there on the left coast. Ning Yu, the brilliant women behind those amazing graphical representations in the Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis "From the Bottom Up", got a real campus job so that she can pay the bills. I totally understand having to pay the bills.

I forgot about Michael Tyworth who received his masters and wondered off to do doctoral work in Pennsylvania. Sorry Mike my oversight was totally inadvertent.

So now our core group is seven, which gives me more collaborators then I ever would have thought possible. We've tackled great research ideas with more output on the burners, personally I can't wait to get back into BROG work with both feet. Gotta qual first though (my mantra these days).

Thanks to Susan Herring for pulling all of us together. Thanks to Elijah Wright and Sabrina Bonus for teaching me, I didn't know much about blogs or blogging when we began. I just had a serious interest in the phenomena and the desire to learn more about it. Thanks to everyone who has joined us since Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs, you challenge me to find new ways to work within a group. Who would have ever thought that work could be this much fun? It can't be legal. LOL

Sushi anyone?

Posted by prolurkr at February 26, 2005 09:49 AM

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