The making of a blog

I just love “behind the scenes” stories.  It probably started back in my Mr. Rogers days when he would show little clips like ‘how the mail gets delivered’ or ‘how crayons are made’.  It makes me appreciate how much goes in to things we do not pay much attention to.  This fascination developed into a devotion to ‘Up close and personal’ sessions during the Olympics and in recent years re-watching the LOTR appendices almost as much as the films.

So I thought it might be interesting to talk about what goes into a blog post.  Blogs are funny things because they are this mix of personal musings and public publication.  It may not be obvious, but I put quite a bit of thought into the blog topic (although, admittedly, not as much into the actual writing and editing).

A new post usually starts off as a bunch of small observations I have made over the past few days.  I walk a lot (to and from school, into town to shop, down the road for coffees, etc) so I have a lot of time to both observe what is happening around me and to reflect on those observations.  Quite honestly, it feels a bit like the beginning of a Seinfeld comedy routine “What’s the deal with people getting on a bus?  Do they all have to ask the bus driver  if the weather is cold enough out there?…”  From there 1 or 2 will stand out as both having a universal appeal as a narrative and some sort of lesson or moral.  Again, as I am walking, I will start “writing” the blog in my head – fleshing out concepts and thinking of a witty title.  However, by the time I actually sit down to type it up I often find that my story isn’t nearly as interesting as it was in my head and that is surely due to the fact that I have forgotten all of the witty bits.  So in an attempt to put pen to paper (obviously figuratively – no pens or paper went into the making of this blog), I just start writing.

Unfortunately, the review process is not as rigorous as the A level journals and after a quick preview I post it.  However, there have been occasions that I have not published the post and they are sitting in drafts waiting to either be edited (which probably won’t happen) or deleted (which probably should happen).  It is funny because I always had this idea that small things were more difficult to write, like a poem is harder than an essay because you have to choose your words so carefully.  However, in this case I find blogging much more difficult than micro-blogging.  I think it is because this feels more permanent while Twittering has a very ephemeral quality (and honestly even with the word count limitation – I don’t choose my Tweet words particularly carefully).

So whatever the reasons or the results, that is the Behind the Music: the making of Fa’s Blog.  Oops I forgot to include the sudden rise to fame, the equally sudden fall caused by addictions to sex/drugs and the where-are-they-now bits….

How I love a good TO DO list

I have recently come out of hiding and returned to the world of the living.  There are a variety of reasons for both my retreat and my re-emergence, mostly related to not wanting to deal with my thesis and realising that I must in fact deal with it.  For the past month or so I have managed to successfully avoid nearly all productive (required-to-graduate) work – but deadlines are now looming (practically crushing me really) – so I have brought back my tried and true tool for ending procrastination – my TO DO list.

I know it seems silly – but lists have some secret power over me, which make me get things done.  In my previous life as a project manager, the walls of my office were covered with large white sheets of paper; each bullet-ed item neatly checked (and crossed off).  When I was in the last few months of my MBA, the lists came back and sure enough chapters were worked on, submitted, revised, and completed.  I don’t know why it has taken me so long to bring the TO DO list back, but it is needed now more than ever.  Here is today’s TO DO list:

• Prepare for this week’s tutorials (done)
• Complete 3 slides for departmental presentation (done)
• Return library books (done)
• Revise 1 section of Methodology chapter (done)
• Write blog (done)

My superpower? Invisibility

I remember when I first started teaching and a very wise old(er) teacher told me when asked about how students felt about teachers – “honey, we are just furniture to them”.  And she was right.  Furniture in the sense that we are very functional, available when needed, and can be ignored when we are not needed.  It might not seem very appealing to be considered furniture, but it is actually quite handy and gives you access to worlds you might not otherwise have.  For instance, being furniture makes you virtually invisible.  Even now as I am re-entering the teaching world at the uni level I can walk across campus and hear and see all sorts of things that I never would be exposed to normally.  So as I was walking back from my tutorial today, I heard a girl telling her mate that she drank too much and should cut back.  I heard another talk about his future plans and yet another couple grinning ear to ear as they parted.  It feels a little like the angel in Wings of Desire – essentially hearing everybody’s thoughts because they don’t notice that I am there.

So I started thinking about how I blog in the same light.  I don’t really notice the people out there in the public who may be reading, just the ones that I know about.  So my blog feels quite invisible in the huge mass of stuff out on the web.  However, occasionally something reminds me that I am revealing my personal thoughts to a quite public audience.  It can be alarming when this happens.  In RL every once in a while, someone approaches me that I don’t recognise.  They start talking to me as if they know me and it takes me a bit to realise that they must be one of my current or former students.  I don’t really recognise them, but they know me.  And I realised that my invisibility doesn’t work all of the time – sort of a flawed superpower.  If you stand up and talk in front of students enough, they will eventually see you and you will have lost your invisibility.  What is more ackward is that because I don’t recognise them, they are invisible and I am the one seen.

So if I blog enough, I am bound to lose my invisibility occasionally as well.  Sort of the price you pay for personal discourse in a public forum.  It is not too bad – really just my 15 minutes – but spread out over many years and presenting itself when I least expect it – 900 seconds of fame (?!) wrapped up in a lifetime of anonymity.

Some of the content from your blog has been stolen

I received the following email message this morning.  I was about to detail it as spam when I decided to check it out.  I was actually a little surprised to find out that indeed, there is another blogger using my posts as his own work.  Now I consider the internet a pretty open place and usually value freedom of knowledge flow over copyright protection, but this is really annoying to me.  How hard would it have been to put a link back to my blog or a couple words giving me credit?  What would be the point of trying to pass off my blog as his own?!  Very annoying and a little creepy.  Let me know what you think about this whole issue.

Here is the email I received from Nick Hine:

Hello, I’m Nick and I run PlagiarismWatch at http://plagiarismwatch.wordpress.com.  Currently it is just me running a small blog dedicated to informing bloggers that they may have had some of their content stolen. At this moment in time I am only tracking one Scraper site, run by a Brandon Berkovits, and I know of him because he stole content from my blog.

So, the post at http://famartinniemi.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/timing-is-the-new-location/ (which is yours) is copied in it’s entirety without crediting you as the original author at the url: http://school-and-other-crap.blogspot.com/2009/03/timing-is-new-location.html by said Brandon Berkovits.

I absolutely guarantee you I will not charge you at all for this information etc, or supply your email to people trying to sell you herbal medicines and the likes, as I dislike spammers almost as much as I do scrapers.

Currently claiming a Copyright Infringement notice at a Blogger blog is difficult, but I can email you a little something telling you how if you’re interested in bringing a sort of justice to this guy. As a preventative measure I recommend licensing your work under creative commons, as they offer a range of licenses dictating just how your content can be used. This is available at http://creativecommons.org

Regards,
Nick Hine

No worries, I have just lost my mind

Seriously, I think I dropped it somewhere between baking cookies and watching Dancing with the Stars – so don’t move I should probably look for it.

I am sitting here waiting to teach my final tutorial of the day and I thought “hey, I haven’t blogged in a while, I should talk about how I am losing my memory”.  So I of course when I see my last post (yes I did forget!), I decided to switch to losing my mind which is probably related to my memory loss.  I would like to drag out one of my common excuses for going completely nutty, like I have been staying up all night working on my methodology chapter due tomorrow (nope), or heavy teaching load (nope) or even just thinking really deep thoughts (nope – see Dancing with the Stars above).

So why am I losing my mind?  And why don’t I even care anymore?  I have slowly gotten used to it.  Just like the choas of student life which used to freak me out when I started, seems ordinary.  Chapter due tomorrow, tutorial starting in 10 minutes, scholarship ending in June – no worries.  I actually only have one worry now, how big, awful, and ugly does something have to be to shake me out of my postgraduate indifference?  Hopefully, I will never have to find out – but if I do at least I won’t remember it for long.  Now let’s start talking about memory loss…

Suffering from short-term (uh) memory loss

Warning!  Prolonged exposure to academic research may cause short-term memory loss.

Years ago when I was an undergrad my (premed) roommates used to torture me by reading from their very graphic biology textbooks.  I heard all about diseases with grusome symptoms as I went to sleep each night.  However, the most memorable thing they retold to me was about a man named JM.  He went in for a routine lobotomy (it was the 1940s I think) and the surgeons accidentally knicked his short-term memory centre.  So (as the medical establishment did in the 40s), they decided to conduct experiments on this poor man with no short-term memory.  They gave him tennis lessons, which he never remembered taking, but he did improve – thanks to muscle memory.  They also gave him a mirror everyday which completely freaked him out since he didn’t understand why he was aging.  And the worst was every day they would tell him that his auntie had died and he would mourn for her over and over again.

Well I am not JM (yet) but sometimes I think I may be losing my short-term (uh) memory.  For instance, today I decided that I needed some more books from the library.  I do this every time I am meant to be writing (not reading!).  So I logged on to the library catalogue and started to search for my favourite terms and authors and threw in a couple new ones (so I thought) to boot.  Well I recognised some of the titles, because the books were still sitting mostly unread all over my desk.  However, there were a couple that I tried to recall (meaning get them back early from the person who has them currently checked out ) only to realise I was the one who had them checked out (yes they were sitting right in front of me).  Now that is worrisome that I do not recognise books that I have recently read.

But it is not all bad losing your memory, the upside is that I often forget that I am losing my (uh) memory and ignorance is truly bliss.

Inflation is bad

If I ever get too confident in my intellectual abilities or quick wit or general cleverness – all I have to do is review my old notes from Economics because one day after 5 hours of lecture the only notes I had were “Inflation is bad” (true story).

So now I find myself 2 years later sitting in a packed lecture theatre face to face w my old economics professor, John McDermott, and I am a little nervous.  My nervousness prompted me to take better notes which involved me knocking over my full (and open) mug of tea and then wiping it up w the sleeve of my jumper as people around me rolled their eyes (also true story).

When he walked in an excited mummer tittered around the stand-room-only venue.  He is a little like a rock star – really all economists are.  They are this brilliant combination of the Man behind the Curtain who secretly controls the (economic) world and the incredibly charismatic storyteller that has you drinking the Koolaid as soon as he describes how financial alchemists and “NINJas” (no incomes, no jobs) brought down the housing markets and most of the world’s economies.  Economists are the modern day philosopher-warriors, like archaeology’s Indy Jones, Alan Greenspan and crew introduced concepts such as central banks, interest rates, free markets, and yes inflation to the masses whilst pulling the levers and predicting/controlling economic behaviours.

Economics is a difficult discipline and most of us are not particularly financially literate, which makes economists even more mysterious and appealing.  They are seers of economic trends reading world events like fortune-tellers read tea leaves.  The difference being that they only give their prophecies after the fact.  But while you are in their presence, they are rock stars and they make you feel like world economies as well as your own little nest egg are in capable hands, from financial crisis hope eternal springs of record setting markets and sustainable growth (you know 1 – 3% because inflation is still bad) -  which is a wonderful feeling.

Rock on! (and pay no attention to that man behind the curtain)

Timing is the new Location

You know 40 is the new 30.  Brown is the new black (or is orange now the new brown?).   So I say that timing is the new location.  Proximity, relation, relevance these have now surpassed mere place-based traits.  Location, location, location – hardly – now the rally cry should be timing, timing, timing.  And for me the wrong time is the new wrong place.

It is fair to say that it is occasionally challenging for me to stop being a technology advocate (evangelist?) and remember that I am an objective, impartial researcher. Today however, my irritation with technology and technology implementation far out-weighed my love affair with the digital. Our division’s IT decided to migrate our exchange mailboxes to new servers (and network?) on the 4th day of the term.  Four days into the busiest week of the entire year.  The communication has been minimal and there was heaps of confusion today as people struggled to figure out how and where to find our current email (and use it!) while we are undergoing the change.

So what’s the big deal?  Anybody who has been around the technology block has been through a similar situation at least a dozen times and it usually involves data loss and 20 hour days.  But for me, it was this on top of a blown motherboard which left my laptop dead for almost 2 weeks and then 2 more days of not being able to get on the division network because “changing your motherboard has unregistered your laptop and you will need to re-register to gain network access”  – aaaaaaaah!

In the middle of this I am advocating for the use of computer-mediated social networking (i.e. Facebook or something similar) to facilitate community development for the SoB (that’s school of business) postgraduates.  Do I need to rethink this or am I over-reacting to the techno-frak-up-trifecta?  Help – time is of the essence.

Looking for tools to model blog conversations

As I start my analysis of blog posts and comments – I can see I am going to need some method of organising and graphically representing the conversations. I have been looking at a couple of tools like NodeXL, but need to capture the sender/receiver relationship as well as the message/post/comment and the time/chronology.

Any thoughts?

Losing (and finding) my religion

Over the past few weeks I have been in search of a methodology – or more correctly my methodology. I have found the search to be a spiritual journey – both an external investigation of theories and a personal introspection of my values and beliefs.  That sounds a bit melodramatic – but it is a pretty accurate description of how it feels.  I was in a bit of  a panic a while back (no surprises there) about how to analyse the conversations and behaviours in blogging communities (lets just assume for a mo that I can actually identify blog communities).  Most blogging research uses either SNA (social network analysis) of the nodes and links or content analysis of surveys and interviews.

I spent a bit of time coming to terms w SNA, content analysis and even discourse analysis – in the end realising that none of those felt right.  I keep coming back to the feeling that to understand the motivations and behaviours of members of a blog community, I need to be as true as possible to their (our) world.  As I struggle w how to remain true to this environment while objectively researching it – I thought of a term that Aussie director Baz Luhrmann uses “real artificiality”.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) and now blog research often suffers from an inferiority complex.  With no face-to-face (FTF) interaction, it is often seen as a poor imitation of real life (RL).  But blog communities are not an imitation (artificial reality) of RL.  They are in fact real artificialities, that is completely constructed realities in their own right which allow members/inhabitants to have a natural experience of that reality (not RL).

So I have returned to ethnography as my methodology/philosophy (although I am still trying to understand ethonomethodology).  As part of that, trying to stay true to my overarching philosophy as I find the tools/techniques/methods for analysing and making sense of what I have observed – I try to approach it as a blog community member.  One of the ways that this paradigm shift changes my methods is that instead of fixating on categorising, ordering, and grouping text – I am trying to tag the conversation threads, themes, and topics in order to view the behaviours through blogging eyes.

Well that is where I am at the mo.  I could probably write on and on about this – I think I am feeling a bit euphoric about completing the first draft of my lit review (yuck – glad that is behind me) and having my laptop Xena back.