The Digital Methods Initiative is holding a three day mini-conference with workshop presenting papers and research proposals.Today I responded to Michael Stevenson’s paper on the history of the blogosphere through the eyes of EatonWeb and the Internet Archive. The following is my summary of his paper and argument followed by questions.

Michael Stevenson. The archived blogosphere: exploring web historical methods using the Internet Archive

Respondent: Anne Helmond, University of Amsterdam. 20 January 2010.

One of the main questions of Stevenson’s research is: How can we use and repurpose the Internet Archive to study the history of the blogosphere?  The Internet Archive is especially useful for single site histories, as the Archive is browsed by URL. However, websites rarely exist in a vacuum on their own. This is partly recognized by the special collections in the Archive on a particular topic or event. Blogs, and their (in)formal linking policies, constitute a different type of collection of sites that do not converge on topic or event but on their formal characteristics: the blogosphere. As Stevenson notes “The genre (of blogs) was defined less by content than by form, with reverse-chronology and the centrality of linking trumping the extent to which bloggers focused on similar topics.” How to deal with a collection of websites in an archive that constitute a separate websphere when the device used is especially useful for studying the history of single sites?

Historical accounts of the blogosphere are often from an anecdotal perspective (Blood 2000 & Rosenberg 2009). Stevenson notes that:

What is missing in this approach, however, is reflection on the changing conditions for historical research when the object of study is the Web, or (as may increasingly be the case) is studied with the Web. (p. 75)

The Internet Archive is described as a legacy system in the sense that it is based on browsing instead of the current trend of searching and in this sense displays aspects of an earlier (web) culture. What is sustained is cyberculture. Cyberculture (1980s-1990s) is characterized by a “commitment to egalitarian and universal access to information” (78). Cyberspace is described as “somewhere else” which is still visible in the IA which prefers browsing over querying. The rise of the blogosphere may be seen as “the rejection of cyberspace” and as a transition phase from cyberculture (egalitarian) to web culture (A-lists). The blogosphere is marked with a strong tension between the idea of egalitarianism and the actual compilation of A-lists by disproportionate linking.

Case study
How to delimit the object of study? DMI asks how the dominant devices do it, for example blogs are defined by the engines as anything that publishes a feed. In this case study the first dominant blogosphere device EatonWeb was taken as a starting point. EatonWeb was a manually created collection (expert-list) of blogs and inclusion was based on the formal characteristic of blogs: reverse-chronological ordered entries. “Of the 947 blogs listed by the directory, 857 (or 85.5%) were present in the Internet Archive.” The missing blogs in the Archive were located by following the outlinks of the blogs in the set. This presents a map of the “whole” early blogosphere.

Contribution
Stevenson contributes to studies on the history of the blogosphere by compiling a new special collection, the Early Blogosphere (according to EatonWeb), that may be mapped and queried. By mapping the outlinks of the blogs in EatonWeb the non-archived blogs (the missing pieces of the archived blogosphere by the Internet Archive) are positioned within the network.

Questions
“The organization of the EatonWeb Portal suggested egalitarianism” which is in line with the characteristics of cyberspace. Are ranking devices the official end of cyberspace? Do you consider EatonWeb in that sense a transitional device?
You have now compiled your own special collection of the early blogosphere. Querying this collection, in contrast to the IA, is now possible. What would you like to ask the collection?
The focus is now on outlinks. Where were these links taken from? The whole page? Suggestion for detailed focus: blogroll analysis only. Do they provide a different map?

Further research
Platform specific maps. Actors receiving links from EatonWeb blogs that are not in the EatonWeb themselves are often blog platforms such as Blogger.com and Pitas.com. Redo map with a focus on platforms. Do platforms cluster?
There are some specific Pitas blogs on the maps, but no specific Blogger.com websites. Is it possible to look “beyond” pitas.com (*.pitas.com) or blogger.com (*.blogger.com) which sites were there?

More info on Michael Stevenson’s & DMI research on the DMI wiki:
Tracing And Mapping The Evolution Of The Early Blogosphere With The Internet Archive
Profiling the Archived Blogosphere
Wayback Web Collections
Early Blog Features

Technorati released their State of the Blogosphere 2008 a few weeks ago and they now supplement their quantitative analysis with a qualitative analysis. While their main focus is still on the numbers they’ve supplemented the figures with interviews and quotes from bloggers to provide a more in depth analysis:

Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind.

In contrary to the Wired article I mentioned yesterday that claims blogs are dead, Technorati claims that all studies show that blogs are alive and kicking:

All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay.

The survey also confirms that blogging is hard work as “Bloggers invest significant time in creating and updating their blogs, as well as driving traffic and retaining their audiences.” In my thesis I described these practices as part of the software-engine regime the blogger is embedded in:

I would like to propose to redefine the current perception we have of the blogger because people might think of the blogger as a pajama clad revolutionary or the lonely writer who sits in the dark in his room. However, the blogger is an active researcher. One would have to admit that the main amount of this activity is engine based. A lot of research is done via engines, it is engine work. (Helmond)

Not only research is related to the engines also the amount of time spent updating, tweaking and modifying the blog. In my further research I would like to focus more on this “modding” user.

The report ends with “the future of the blog” which I think Brett Bumeter sums up pretty well when he says that:

This is just the beginning for blogging. People are getting better and better at this skill set [...]

Blogging has moved from the domain of the coder to the easy publishing model which has increasingly become more complex and less easy. If you take a look at the current WordPress release ‘easy’ is not what comes to mind first. While it is fairly easy to learn it has become an complex system which allows for various practices of blogging. Blogs are transforming into a media platform:

The word blog is irrelevant, what’s important is that it is now common, and will soon be expected, that every intelligent person (and quite a few unintelligent ones) will have a media platform where they share what they care about with the world. (Seth Godin)

After the trackback has been declared dead over and over again the phenomenon of blogging is now facing the same fate. Twitter and other social networking sites have been heralded as the future applications. The medium of blogs (“blogs are dead“) has been declared dead aproximately 14,800 times and the practice of blogging (“blogging is dead“) aproximately 19,000 times.

I read several critiques on the ‘blogging is dead’ article in the recent edition of Wired Magazine. Now that ‘Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004‘ has also been published online I guess the oldfashioned blogosphere is ready for even more critiques.

According to Wired Magazine blogs are impersonal, food for flames and you shouldn’t even botter with blogging as your blog will always be outranked by Wiki pages.

What Paul Boutin fails to recognize is the transformation of traditional blog software into more robust Content Management Systems. Boutin still sees blogs as a text-based medium that do not allow for different kinds of blogging practices:

Further, text-based Web sites aren’t where the buzz is anymore. The reason blogs took off is that they made publishing easy for non-techies. Part of that simplicity was a lack of support for pictures, audio, and videoclips. At the time, multimedia content was too hard to upload, too unlikely to play back, and too hungry for bandwidth. (Paul Boutin)

Not only has the popular blogging software WordPress been working and improving image and video implementation, tons of plugins exist to make these types of publishing easy for non-techies too. Multimedia is part of the current blogging medium and practice and will become even more important in the near future.

As a final note I would like to say that I see Twitter and social networking sites as complementing the medium and practice of blogging by integrating them into your blog. I use Twitter and my blog differently and some things are typical Twitter material (@mycolleague running 5 minutes late due to traffic) while other things require more than 140 characters and additional photos and videos (such as my lecture transcriptions).

Today we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the word weblog as coined on December 17, 1997 by Jorn Barger. In another two years we can celebrate the coinage of the word blog but in the meanwhile let’s focus on creating new pathways into the history of blogging. Instead of arguing about definitions and dates we should write more blogging histories as there is no single history of blogs and blogging. Michael Stevenson is working on one, I am working on one and Jill Walker Rettberg is working on her final manuscript of her Blogging book.

So happy birthday webloggers!

In the meanwhile I celebrated my birthday and got some incredible hand-made gifts from my friends:

1. My friends (including my non-geeky friends) often call me “the Web 2.0 Girl”

2. Notebooks for Random Access Memory

3. Extra memory and my avatar in pixels.

4. Control-Alt-Delete (if I ever lose my keys again)

I can only say tHaNK J00 9uY$, J00 4r3 9Re@!!

I’m tired! It doesn’t matter how fast I read I never seem to be able to catch up. It is actually making me feel rather stressed out. What am I talking about? Keeping up with blogs and RSS feeds. There are two main reasons I am subscribed to tons of feeds:

1. I am doing research on blogging (I have to be in the middle of the heat and stay up-to-date right?)

2. I am an information junkie (I want to know what’s happening and where and why and I want to know it all!)

To organize my feeds I started out with Feedreader, but in November it was time to try some new programs which I wrote about in a post titled “Review: Feedreader, Google Reader, Bloglines, Thunderbird RSS Reader.” In a comment Fabian suggested trying Netvibes and I have been using it ever since. Netvibes is an Ajax portal (refreshed feeds on the spot) which is completely customizable in the way it looks and how feeds are displayed. It allows me to keep my scattered digital self in once place with Google Mail, del.icio.us, MySpace and tons of other modules. You can drag and drop your feeds and modules and make different pages with tabs to keep everything sorted by topic. BusinessLogs actually lists Netvibes in their top 10 “The Web’s Best Interface Design.”

Every page or blog you visit which has a RSS feed can easily be added to Netvibes using their Firefox extension. Just a click on a button and you are subscribed to the feed and it will display on your Netvibes page. I love it. The only downside is, that because it is so easy I ended up subscribing to more stuff that I could actually keep up with. So this morning it was time for some housekeeping. I unsubscribed from dozens of feeds I hardly read anymore by simply clicking the close button. I am better organized now and I hope I can keep my finger off the Netvibes button to add more feeds :)

I have tons of blogs and sites that I read on a daily basis. So a few years ago I started using Feedreader, a nice free RSS-reader, but I am not totally satisfied with it. It doesn’t allow any control over how often it updates my feeds, some posts are not displayed right and it has this annoying tendency to stay minimalized.

Since Firefox 2 came out I started using their new option the Firefox Live Bookmark. Instead of static bookmarks you can now subscribe to pages with dynamic content such as blogs. However, I don’t like the display, look, feel and handle of the Live Bookmarks e.g. it just displays the header title.

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