“David Huffaker”:http://www.eyec.com/’s masters thesis, “Gender Similarities and Differences in Online Identity and Language Use among Teenage Bloggers”:http://cct.georgetown.edu/thesis/DavidHuffaker.pdf has received some attention from BBC news because of its findings that (surprise surprise) teens tended to reveal more personal details on blogs than in chatrooms and forums. This chimes immediately with the Daily Mail-reader paranoia about cyber-stalkers…

A plugin for Movable Type weblogs that allows you to send out notifications to subscribed users when a new comment is posted to an entry to which they have subscribed. This works well with message boards that employ it. I hope “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org/ implements the same thing as I am planning to migrate to it shortly (I like the nested categories and the ability to post password-protected posts).

Seb Paquet references an “interesting paper”:http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon.html on the history of scientific publishing and the impact of ISI ranking. It points out how assigning numerical rankings to measure academic quality distorts the way that academic research is published.

What that paper doesn’t mention – at least not in ch 6 which Seb highlighted – is that because high citation ranking = $ many journals end up “gaming” their impact factors by choosing the kind of papers they publish in order to maximise it, which has unintended consequences. If a journal has 10 papers that it knows will be highly cited it may limit the number of other papers it accepts for example to try not to ‘dilute’ its impact factor.

It’s the same with the ranking systems used by Google and by weblog ranking search engines. If there are benefits to being scored highly, human nature being what it is people will try to maximise their scores. Yet because the ranking is ‘automatic’ it is often assumed to be value neutral and therefore above criticism.

The 4290 inhabitants of a bunch of really isolated islands off the coast of Scotland were given computers and Internet access through some government programme. Then a few months later the BBC turned up and tried to encourage them to produce weblogs.

Well, after a couple of ill-attended meetings and promotion in the local media, altogether 72 people had created blogs by the end of six months (of those, only eight have been “updated within the last week”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/whereilive/westernhighlandsandislands/islandblogging/bloggers/). Of course part of the relatively low takeup might be to do with the fact that the BBC blogs were hosted by the BBC and were pre-moderated – you’d post something and it would take a day to be approved! Not surprisingly (since these people live in pretty close contact with their neighbours) none of the weblogs tried to be controversial in their communities or political – instead they tended to concentrate on mundane day to day community events.

I spoke to the man from the BBC (Richard Holmes) after his presentation at “NotCon”:http://www.notcon04.com/ and he said that some of the community leaders on the island did take up blogging early on but abandoned it and that those who kept blogging were a cross-section of the community. I hope some more in-depth studies have been done on this experiment and I will be interested to see how many of the people who were started off blogging carry on doing it once the BBC stops the experiment (due to finish this month).

It’s interesting to me that even with 100% access and encouragement in the end only .1% of the islands’ population ended up blogging regularly. I wish I had been there to gather some ethnographic detail that would explain why (though I have a few guesses).

I have been rather jealous to read about all the net-related conferences in the US I have had to miss but NotCon in London made up a lot of ground for me – it was the most stimulating nine hours I have spent in ages. I’ll post more about it over the next week I am sure, meanwhile here are few pretty dreadful (but quickly uploaded!) “pictures from the event”:http://community.webshots.com/album/150042801KUvpqS.

I’m sure there will be lots more “weblog postings about NotCon”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xcom2002.com%2Fnc04%2F&sub=Go%21 (or “here”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.notcon04.com%2F&sub=Go%21) as soon as the rest of the bloggers get home and start chatting about it.

“Alex Halavais”:http://alex.halavais.net/ has tried to produce a ranking of

American academic trade publication The Chronicle featured an article last year about Scholars Who Blog. As you might expect, those who do it often find it rewarding: Blogging ‘has some of the best aspects of peer review built into it,’ Jacob Levy wrote in a “post about blogging”:http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/2002_09_01_jacobtlevy_archive.html#81283697. Scholars’ entries ‘are instantly monitored and responded to by others as well-informed as they are.’ Interestingly, the article claims:

“To a remarkable degree, blogs also appear to bring full professors, adjuncts, and students onto a level field. With no evident condescension, senior faculty bloggers routinely link to the political-affairs blog maintained by Matthew Yglesias, a senior at Harvard University.”

It certainly isn’t just faculty producing interesting stuff – I was impressed recently when I came across “Read Me”:http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/ReadMe/ – which turned out to be produced by students in the Department of Journalism at New York University.

It seems to me the UK is far behind the US when it comes to the amount of academic blogging going on (see “PhDWeblogs”:http://www.phdweblogs.net/ for evidence – if it is working). I wonder if it is the speed of diffusion of technology, cultural differences between the US and the UK or attitudes to technology or self-disclosure here that make the difference?

A month ago I put my two cents into the discussion going on “here”:http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/~paquetse/cgi-bin/om.cgi?Research_Blogs/Self-Organizing_Directory_Development about what an ideal database of research weblogs would look like. Lots of interesting ideas on the page but I don’t know, alas, if any development is actually going ahead. I wish I had the expertise to do something myself. Maybe someone will pick up the ball during the summer break?

See this page for more postings about weblog metadata.

Sébastien Paquet has “written a paper”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2004/04/21.html#a1548 about the usefulness of “Internet Topic Exchange”:http://topicexchange.com/ – a rather nifty web service that lets several people with weblogs that handle trackback group their postings together by subject.

It’s a little hard to explain – for example, I create a ‘UK Media Studies’ topic exchange page, then every time I make a post that relates to that topic I add a trackback link to that page (just as if it was a weblog). Other people do likewise. Instead of checking all of their weblogs for new postings I can just check that subject page. Take a look at this “weblog research”:http://topicexchange.com/t/weblog_research/ topic exchange to see how it’s done.

Thanks to Lilia Efimova for the link.

“Ethan Zuckerman”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethan/ – philanthropist, academic and geek – has recently been “quantifying”:http://h2odev.law.harvard.edu/ezuckerman/ which countries are written about by which media outlets. Of particular interest to bloggers he has been comparing ‘mainstream news’ outlets to what the blogosphere talks about.

One possible methodological weakness – his study doesn’t seem to weight by impact or story length. If, say, NBC talks about Sudan once in the news for three minutes it may have more impact among Americans than a hundred mentions in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the The Free Lance-Star etc (let alone the many overseas news sources on Google News). The same argument could be made about blog postings – if lots of ‘minor’ blogs post about the Sudan but none of the majors do, that is important to capture. Of course no research method is perfect and it is a lot easier to poke holes than suggest methods of one’s own. So hats off to Ethan for at least starting a debate!

Also see some analysis of the coverage of “The Sudan in particular”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethan/2004/05/27#a209 and in the comments I found references to “NKZone”:http://nkzone.typepad.com/nkzone/ a weblog about the biggest news black hole – North Korea.